


Relligo Spiritus

by Kittenshift17



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Crushes, Cuddling & Snuggling, Everyone can see you want to kiss, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Minor Violence, Pretending they're not mad for each other, Severus Snape Lives, Sex, Soul Bond, There's a bit where someone geta their heart cut eaten, They were already dead, What Canon?, but still, i take a hammer and i fix the canon, it's pathetic, seriously, shouting, soul mates
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:27:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 33,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25163116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kittenshift17/pseuds/Kittenshift17
Summary: “What did you think the Relligo Spiritus charm did, you fool!?” he spat.“Um...” Hermione wracked her brain, though with him still shaking her the thought didn’t come easily.She gasped when she unearthed within her psyche the spell he spoke of, her eyes flying to his furious face.“Oh.... my....” Hermione breathed when he flung her back against the wall once more, realising she knew why he’d come; knew how he’d survived when even her healing efforts ought not to have saved him from his well-earned oblivion.“Tethered Souls,” he snarled in her face, looming over her threateningly. “You tethered our fucking souls, Granger!”
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Severus Snape
Comments: 676
Kudos: 1163





	1. Chapter 1

“Oh dear Merlin, what is happening?” Hermione Granger clutched at her curls and stared wide-eyed at the being before her.

“Hysteria is unwarranted, Miss Granger,” Severus Snape drawled in reply, eyeing her like she was the stupidest girl to ever live.

Hermione gasped, the sound of his voice slithering across her psyche like a snake in a sleeping-bag and making the hair on the back of her neck stand on end.

“I thought you were dead!” she gasped, subconsciously reaching toward him and touching his chest to confirm he was, in fact, real and not simply an apparition conjured from the depths of her potentially demented mind.

“You were mistaken,” he replied coolly. “And while I’m sure it must be a disappointment for you, do try and get of a hold of yourself and get _out_ of the doorway.”

He stepped closer, crossing the threshold and invading her home as though he had every right. Indeed, he put his hands on her shoulders and steered her pliant form out of his path and into the wall, pinning her just inside the doorway before he glared down at her.

“You’re alive,” Hermione repeated, shell-shocked.

“I’m alive,” he sneered. “Though why you feign surprise when it’s by your hand, I cannot fathom.”

“My... my hand?” Hermione asked, staring up at him in confusion and sensing that he wasn’t overly thrilled by his continued existence, actually.

“Your hand,” he agreed. “It was you who forced the bezoar down my throat, you may recall. You who fed me some experimental antivenin for Nagini’s venom. You who injected Blood Replenishment potions into my veins. You who sealed my wounds with some spell that baffled the Healers at the hospital when the same wounds were a nightmare for them when treating Arthur Weasley for the same ailment. You who cast innumerable charms over my dying form and thus, rendered me back into existence on this wretched plane.”

“You... oh, god! You survived. You...” Hermione stammered, her mind trying to catch up with what he was telling her, trying to fathom that this wasn’t some crazy dream. 

“Indeed,” Snape hissed. “And I ought to inform you, Miss Granger, I’m not here out of gratitude.”

Hermione’s stomach flipped with fear when he glared down at her like that before he kicked the door to her flat closed, letting it slam sinisterly.

“Sir, I...” she began, frowning up at him.

“Do you have _any_ idea what you did, you wretched little fool?” he snarled, baring those crooked teeth at her and glaring down that hooked nose at her hatefully.

“What are you... sir, I don’t understand,” Hermione tried. 

The breath huffed from her lungs when he pulled her forward only to slam her back against the wall viciously, and it was only then that she realised he was trembling with fury.

“You moronic, idiotic, short-sighted, _stupid_ witch!” he snarled into her face. “ _How_ _could_ _you_?”

“I... sir, what?” Hermione asked, though it was difficult to enunciate clearly when he began shaking her violently.

“What did you think the _Relligo Spiritus_ charm did, you fool!?” he spat.

“Um...” Hermione wracked her brain, though with him still shaking her and rattling her brain like that, the thought didn’t come easily. 

She gasped when she unearthed within her psyche the spell he spoke of, her eyes flying to his furious face. 

“Oh.... my....” Hermione breathed when he flung her back against the wall once more, realising she knew why he’d come; knew how he’d survived when even her healing efforts ought not to have saved him from his well-earned oblivion. 

“Tethered Souls,” he snarled in her face, looming over her threateningly. “You _tethered our fucking souls_ , Granger!”

Hermione gulped audibly in the silence that followed but for his heavy breathing while he glowered at her. 

“Well....” Hermione murmured; her eyes fixed upon his face while a rushing sound began to fill her ears. “Shit!”


	2. Chapter 2

“There must be some mistake,” Hermione said when she’d recovered, blinking up at the man still breathing hard and glaring down at her.

“You think so?” Snape asked arching, that damnable eyebrow raising at her in challenge.

“I wouldn’t have cast the _Relligo Spiritus_ charm, sir,” Hermione frowned at him. “I know I was casting a lot of spells on you in that shack and trying to bargain for your life but I’m sure I’d remember if I’d… um… tethered our souls.”

He snorted derisively and Hermione could see from the tight line of his shoulders and the stiff way he held him – his fists clenched at his sides – that he was trying hard to refrain from strangling her.

She flinched back when he suddenly yanked his wand from his sleeve, the breath huffing from her lungs again as she hit the wall and found there was no escape. He curled his lip hatefully and glowered at her some more before flicking his wrist to cast.

“ _Relligo revelio,_ ” he hissed, and Hermione squeezed her eyes closed, fearing he might hex her for good measure.

When she cracked one eye open to peek, waiting for pain that didn’t come, she found him eyeing her hatefully, his face illuminated by the spell he’d cast. Hermione blinked, her eyes opening wide as she looked down at the small space separating them.

“Oh my,” Hermione whispered, eyeing the magic linking them.

And there could be no denying they were linked. A midnight blue rope of magic dotted with glowing white and silver strands like the starry night’s sky connected the two of them. She could see the bright white glow of her own soul illuminated within her body, and the same within his.

“Tethered,” he spat, cancelling the spell when he realised that she was admiring the colours and the magic, rather than simply being horrified. “And since I certainly didn’t cast that charm, Miss Granger, your guilt seems evident.”

“But…” Hermione frowned. “I didn’t… I’d have remembered if I… I mean, I _was_ casting in a hurry, but surely I wouldn’t have…”

She stopped speaking when she found the tip of his wand digging into her neck, forcing her back against the wall once more.

“Do not do either of us the disservice of feigning stupidity, Miss Granger,” he threatened quietly, enunciating each word in that careful, dangerous way of his.

“I’m not,” Hermione said, eyeing him in return. “I don’t remember casting it, Professor. I cast a lot of spells that day to try and keep you alive. If I cast this one, too, then I’m sorry. But it seems I achieved my objective given that you’re still alive.”

“You had no right,” he growled furiously.

“I did what any reasonable person would have done,” Hermione argued. “You were wounded. You were _dying_. You couldn’t articulate your wishes to do so, and so I acted to save your life. I won’t apologise for that, S-Severus!”

His nostrils flared and his eyes narrowed hatefully at her use of his first name when she hadn’t been given permission and his wand dug into her neck a little harder, making her wince.

“If you’re not going to curse me, then I’d appreciate it if you would lower your wand, sir,” Hermione said, batting the weapon away from her neck and squaring her shoulders. “Now, obviously this is a problem and needs to be dealt with. Shall we discuss it over tea?”

She slipped past him and down the hall of her flat, stomping into the kitchen and straight over to the kettle to fill it and put it on to boil. She didn’t hear him follow her and she didn’t look over her shoulder to check. She prepared a tea tray quickly, not knowing how he might take his tea in the slightest. When it was ready, she moved across the room and through the small arched doorway to retrieve a book on healing spells and soul magic where she didn’t doubt she’d read about the spell he’d accused her of using.

“Alright, then,” she said, and she thumbed through it on her return to the kitchen, intent on making tea and having a discussion about the mess she’d supposedly landed them in.

She stopped in her tracks to find the kitchen empty.

“Professor?” she asked, frowning and moving to peer down the hall in search of him.

He still stood where she’d left him, his wand still gripped, white-knuckled, in one hand while he leaned the other against the wall where he’d slammed her. He was breathing heavily, and Hermione frowned, wondering if he’d taxed his strength confronting her and shaking her. She didn’t imagine that the scant three months since the end of the war had been enough for him to recover after the injuries he’d sustained.

“Sir?” she asked, clutching the book to her chest like a shield so as not to lose her place while she frowned at him worriedly.

He didn’t acknowledge her except to turn his head far enough to meet her eye.

Hermione squirmed under the heavy weight of his gaze, shifting from foot to foot and finding herself tingling all over, suddenly flushed with the urge to run for her life. He looked at her like he wanted to curse her into oblivion. He looked like he was thinking about trying it, even knowing that as long as their souls were tethered, it probably wouldn’t do either of them any good. He looked like he wanted to wring her neck and like he wanted to charge down the hall and shake her all over again.

“Tea?” she offered weakly, unsure what to say in the face of such a look. “I have the book that details the charm and it’s effects… maybe we can figure out a way to remove it…”

He curled his lip back from his teeth hatefully, still leaning against the wall like he hadn’t the strength to stand on his own. Even just looking at him, Hermione felt drained, realising how truly exhausted he must be.

“There _is_ no way to remove it, you fool,” he said quietly, surprising her when he didn’t sound angry or bitter. Indeed, he only sounded tired and strained, and like he pitied her. “In your idiocy and your brazen attempts to play the heroine, you have irreparably bound our spirits for all eternity, Hermione.”

Hermione bit her lip, shocked to hear him use her first name, for perhaps the first time in her memory. Tears prickled at her eyes when she held his gaze and saw the truth of his words in his eyes. She knew he was right. She’d studied the spell intently when she’d stumbled across it while she was researching everything she could about healing magic after Ron had splinched. She’d spent months whilst on the run practicing the numerous spells to use on her friends in the event that the worst should happen. She knew there was no way to undo it.

“I didn’t mean to,” she whispered, her eyes filling.

His hand shook around his wand and he lowered his eyes from her, staring down at the weapon in his grip for a long moment like he was contemplating cursing her. Hermione flinched when he shoved off the wall and turned away from her, flinging open the door to her flat and stalking from her home, down the front steps and into her small front yard. He left the door open but didn’t look back before twisting sharply and disapparating with a crack so loud it echoed all the way down her street.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hermione gets a suprise visit from an unexepcted source

In the days following his invasion of her flat and his announcement of their souls being tethered to one another for all eternity, Hermione paced her flat nervously. She didn’t imagine he was through with her. Far from it. Severus Snape was, after all, a man who’d spent nigh on two decades soldiering on and fighting the good fight to bring down the man who had killed the woman he loved. He was a man who, despite those efforts, managed to despise and routinely antagonise the son of that lost love simply because of the grudge he held against the man who’d – in his eyes – stolen her from him.

Severus Snape was a man more than capable of holding a grudge and, it would seem to Hermione, of festering in his anger and his hate, all the while plotting to exact revenge. She did not imagine that his declaration of their eternal bond would be met by no reprisals. For days, she paced, jumping at every car backfiring on the road outside her house, twitching at every shout from the muggles in her neighbourhood going about their lives, and tensing at every creak and groan of her old house amid the cold winter weather.

But he did not reappear.

Soon, the days blurred into weeks, and weeks into months, and Hermione Granger slowly stopped worrying that Severus Snape might seek to visit some terrible fate upon her – after all, it would not free him, so what would be the point? Often, she reminded herself that he must surely be simply biding his time, waiting for just the right moment when she finally let her guard down once more, so that he might pounce for her throat unimpeded. But soon nigh on a year had passed, almost to the day, since he invaded her home and revealed he was alive, and still she did not hear a peep from him.

Gardening one morning while on leave over the Christmas break from her Ministry position as an understudy to the Department of Magical Creatures office – beast department, Hermione had almost put her guilt out of her mind. And she was guilty; there could be no mistake about that. She had practiced, for months, the collection of healing charms she would perform on Harry in the event that the worst should happen. She had trained herself over and over again, reciting a litany in her head of all the healing spells in her repertoire until she felt certain she could write every spell in it’s Latin spelling with her eyes closed; she could practice every wrist movement of the spells’ motions in her sleep. She had so practiced it, so memorized it and so thoroughly ruminated upon it, that she imagined she would still be able to recite all fifty spells upon her deathbed over a century from now.

She didn’t imagine, in that moment when she had dived to Snape’s aid once Voldemort was gone, that her muscle memory and her cognitive pathways would have failed her. She might not actively remember casting that exact charm upon the man, but she had seen the evidence for herself that it was so. They were bound at the soul and there was no untethering such a bond. She had been so utterly prepared to do that for Harry; so certain that Harry Potter’s life and Harry Potter’s soul would be bought at the expense of her own eternity if necessary to protect the wizarding world from darkness and see the prophecy fulfilled, that it had become second nature.

She was guilty of tethering them. She was the culprit for binding them. She had tied his soul – for all eternity – to her own. And it was a terrible and rather deplorable thing – at least to her mind – that she didn’t even remember doing it. He could still have died, of course. Some wounds were simply too dire to be able to heal, if even by magical tether of the spirit. One day they would both die, and they would either be ghosts together, or reincarnated together, or move into the next plane of existence together, but never separate. Never parted. The spell she had cast was the very foundation upon which soulmate tales and legends and myths and stories had been built. Forever more, the souls of Hermione Granger and Severus Snape would walk whatever plane of existence they chose, and forever more they would be drawn to seek out the other. It was a red thread of fate; a puzzle with two pieces, a connection that would endure throughout the ages for the rest of eternity. And Hermione didn’t even remember casting it.

She had wanted to explain it to him; to tell him what she believed had happened and how she believed it had come to pass. She wanted to tell him that she was sorry she’d done it, and that she truly hadn’t meant to rob him of oblivion or eternity like this. But he was nowhere to be found.

Well…

That wasn’t _entirely_ true. Hermione knew that had she wanted to badly enough, she could find him. Forever more, if she wanted to find him badly enough, she would be able to do so. There was a spell – a nifty little bit of magic that piggybacked off the Apparation charm that allowed the three vital rules of Apparation to bend. If she badly enough needed to seek Snape out, she could simply hold not a destination in her mind, but a thought of him and their tethered souls, and she would find herself in his presence.

It was, she believed, how he had located her in the first place. It was how he had breeched every protective ward and enchantment she had placed upon her home, for the magic recognised him as simply an extension of her. A piece of the greater whole. No ward he cast would keep her from him, no bit of magic would protect her from him, either. If he was so inclined as to invade her home again with a mind to torture her, none of her wards would keep him out.

She had avoided seeking him. It was easier this way. Their tethering didn’t demand cohabitation, or cooperation. It would not force love upon them, or anything else so fanciful. All it would really do, was tie them together. Were she to experience enough pain, for example, he would suffer. The draining of her energy would begin to sap his strength and vice versa. Indeed, following his visit, Hermione had realised that she had taken so long to recover after the war not because of anything she had personally survived, but because of what he’d barely escaped. From the minute she’d tethered their souls, her strength had been pouring into him. It was what had kept him from death, and her own wounds had taken so long to heal and her strength had taken so long to return because he had been drawing upon it all throughout his recovery.

She believed, presently, that he must be well again, or frightfully close to being one hundred percent restored because she herself felt flushed with life and youth. It was how she’d found herself out in the garden despite the bleakness of a Cotswold winter. She had energy to burn, and it might as well be spent weeding the back garden, thank you very much.

Or so she thought.

“Well, well, well, finally let your guard down, eh, Mudblood?” a low, rough voice crooned from behind her and Hermione snatched for the wand she set down by the garden’s edge, but it sailed from her grip quickly as she turned on her knees to face her intruders.

She knew them. Of course, she knew them. Their faces were still on all the Wanted posters. Looming over her and looking mighty pleased about it were none other than Fenrir Greyback, Antonin Dolohov and Francis Scabior. They were dirty and looked like they hadn’t bathed in some time. They also looked terribly like they meant her harm.

Something proven when Dolohov shot her a cruel smirk before raising his wand and silently casting the Cruciatus curse before she had even a moment to register her disarmed and vulnerable state. She had dirt under her nails and grass stains on the knees of her yard-jeans, for Merlin’s sake. Hermione mouth opened in a silent scream as her body began to writhe under the torture, her head cracking on the birdbath she recently installed before the structure toppled on top of her, all while she flailed and twitched upon the muddy ground, recalling another wand she’d writhed under and another scream that had torn her vocal chords to shreds.

She had only a moment to wonder if this might be her penance for what she robbed from Severus, before she blacked out from the pain.


	4. Chapter 4

Severus Snape sagged against his Potions workbench with a groan, suddenly devoid of energy, gripping the edges of the table for balance. Merlin, he hadn’t felt this weak in months. He’d been recovering this past year, slowly improving as the weeks and months passed since the conclusion of the war and his subsequent, reluctant survival.

“What the fuck is she _doing_?” Severus hissed, baring his teeth as his strength waned further, taxing his energy and power viciously.

Severus didn’t know how things had been for Miss Granger since his invasion of her flat at the discovering of their tethered souls almost a year ago, but for him, it had been painfully evident that they were linked. Every day he felt stronger, every day _feeling_ the borrowed strength she leant him, feeling that his recovery was costing her some of her spritely youth. He had _known_ , intimately, that the speed with which he’d recovered had, in large part, been owed to the bond she’d sparked between them and the energy that travelled through it to further tether their souls and tie him to this plane alongside her.

As such, Severus knew in a heartbeat that wherever she was, whatever she was doing, his sudden onset of weakness was her doing.

“Fuck,” Severus panted, gripping the bench furiously.

She had to be in trouble. She had to be suffering – something taxing her body so rapidly that it taxed his, too. Hell, to be affecting him so rapidly and so encompassingly, the little wretch had to be dying. It served her right, he thought viciously, still furious with the ridiculous witch who had so robbed him of oblivion. Severus narrowed his eyes, pushing back to his feet resolutely, refusing to let this tax him so, trying desperately to shut down the connection between them as best he could.

Closing off their bond helped, but Severus could still feel his strength rapidly waning. He was forced to sit at his potions bench, trying to weather the storm, hoping it would be over soon. Breathing heavily through it and fighting a wave of dizziness that made his stomach lurch uncomfortably.

He sighed when reprieve came, letting out a shaky breath and pinching the bridge of his nose against his sudden headache. Sweet Merlin, what trouble had the girl gotten herself into now?

After barely a moment where he was able to catch his breath, the vicious pull on his strength returned tenfold, and in a heartbeat, Severus _knew_ what ailed Miss Granger. He’d endured the Cruciatus curse enough times in his life to know the rhythm of that particular spell, and if he was any kind of expert, Hermione Granger was suffering under the Cruciatus curse right this very minute.

“Who the fuck would…!?” he growled, shooting to his feet and digging his wand from his pocket, trying to recall from his perusal of the newspaper throughout the year which of his fellow brethren were still at large and evading Ministry capture.

“Dolohov,” he growled, his eyes narrowing, recalling with terrible clarity the curse that wretch had used on Granger when she’d been just sixteen. Severus himself had laboured over her agonized form for seventeen straight hours that night at the Headmaster’s behest; Albus insisting that Harry would not endure the death of his best friend alongside the death of his godfather. “And Greyback!”

He had _known_ that night after the Department of Mysteries that Dolohov’s curse - having failed to kill Miss Granger - would imbed a tracking spell into her very flesh, allowing the wretch to track her down at a later date. Severus had warned Albus of it at the time, and steps had been taken to protect her home, her muggle parents, and her person as best they could without actually notifying her of the tracking spell.

And if Severus recalled anything from his time amongst the brethren of Death Eaters during the war, he recalled Greyback’s regular insistence that he be allowed to defile the girl as he saw fit after she’d fought so fiercely and evaded them so well as to escape Malfoy Manor right from under their noses. Yes, if the girl was truly under the Cruciatus curse at this moment, Severus would bet hard earned galleons that they were the culprits. He also knew they wouldn’t stop until they had tortured her into madness, probably defiled her into insanity, and then desecrated her corpse.

And since Severus didn’t particularly like the sound of the wretched witch showing up here to haunt him when her soul was freed from her body and yet still tethered to this plane; to him; until he could get around to kicking the bucket himself, he supposed he would have to do _something_ about it.

“Of all the wretched, selfish, idiotic, lazy, dunderheaded ridiculous,” he snarled, reaching inside himself for the magic tethering them and tugging on it sharply before twisting in a tight circle, apparting directly to her side, still cursing. “Irresponsible, immature, unprepared, dim-witted, moronic, _fucking stupid_ things to do! Who doesn’t cast charms to keep Death Eaters at bay after provoking them?”

Severus was flat-out ranting at the witch when he landed in her back garden and spied her bloodied and unconscious form on the ground under Dolohov’s wand.

Greyback turned sharply at the sound of his voice, his eyes narrowing.

“Snape?” he growled in surprise, evidently shocked to see him.

Severus supposed he couldn’t blame the werewolf. He’d kept it _very_ quiet that he’d survived. In fact, other than Miss Granger, everyone else who’d had a hand in his recovery had had their memories modified and Severus had been recuperating at home – a new home after his home at Spinner’s End was destroyed by the Death Eaters when his betrayal was unveiled at his supposedly post-humous trial thanks to Potter’s big bloody mouth.

“Greyback,” Severus sneered before leaping into action. “ _Avada_ _Kedavra_!”

Greyback yelled in surprise before his eyes widened and he went down. It probably wouldn’t kill him. More than once, Severus had seen this particular werewolf take a Killing Curse and live to see another day. Maybe he had a tethered soul, too. Maybe it was the lycanthropy. Maybe it was just bad bloody luck. Severus wasn’t going to ponder the notion to find out.

“You!” Scabior sneered, turning to him, already firing sloppy spells at Severus, stepping over Greyback’s prone form without a care. There was no love lost amongst villains.

“Scabior,” Severus hissed, twirling is wand expertly and out-duelling the other man easily, though the vile prick managed to hit him with a few slicing hexes despite Severus’s best efforts. Scabior had never mastered the art of non-verbal spells, so his intentions were clear with every curse he growled, but the little bastard was fast; faster than Severus, given his current lethargy thanks to the tax Miss Granger had place upon his strength and his slow recuperation after Nagini’s bite.

Severus parried one, two, three nasty but rather minor curses, deflecting them with an ease than made Scabior’s eyes widen, nonetheless, before he realised he was outmatched. Scabior made to run, mouth open, his body mid-twist to disapparate.

“ _Avada_ _Kedavra_ ,” Severus hissed again, catching the man just as his began to disappear.

The result was messy, half of Scabior’s body splinching and falling in a gruesome mess upon Miss Granger’s back lawn. The other half, Severus assumed, would rot in whatever bolt hole the fool had thought to invade. He only hoped it wasn’t somewhere muggles might find the remains.

“Severus,” Dolohov said, turning to Severus and lifting his curse from Granger where she twitched in the flower beds, her body half-covered by a toppled bird-bath, wet with the water from the device, as well as whatever unfortunate loss of bodily control had been wrought by the Cruiciatus.

“Antonin,” Severus said mildly. “Always rather enjoyed lusting after the young ones, didn’t you?”

“She ain’t that young,’ Dolohov scowled. “Be nineteen by now, I’d reckon. Maybe twenty. More than legal.”

“Not that legality has ever stopped you before,” Severus drawled, raising one eyebrow and daring the monster to deny it.

“Heard you were dead,” Dolohov grumbled.

“We all have our ways of evading Ministry arrest, it would seem,” Snape answered. “Thought you’d be in Russia, by now?”

“Borders are being too closely watched,” Dolohov shrugged his shoulders, squaring up to Snape, his dark eyes fixed on him dangerously. He didn’t look scared despite the short work Severus had made of them man’s fellows, but then, Dolohov was fearless. Always had been while Severus had known him. Not even the Dark Lord cowed Dolohov.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” Severus told him mildly.

“Don’t reckon you’ve got much business telling me she’s too young if you’re calling on her yourself, _mudak_ ,” Dolohov smirked.

“How did you find her?”

“You know how,” Dolohov grinned.

“And the wards?” Severus asked.

Dolohov shrugged. “Used to be a curse breaker, remember? Knew she was here from the tracking spell. Was just a matter of peeling back the layers of warding, one after another.”

“And them?” Severus asked, tipping his head toward Scabior and Greyback. “Going to share her, were you?”

“Imagine how she’d scream,” Dolohov practically purred, a dreamy look coming over his face.

Severus took full advantage. Dolohov dodged the Killing Curse, and flung an Ice-Vein Hex, but Severus was an adept dueller and had spent years studying the fighting styles of his fellow Death Eaters. Side-stepping the hex, Severus hit the other man with a _Crucio_ , and Dolohov fell to the ground, writhing and screaming in agony. Severus didn’t let up. Too often during his time with the brethren, he’d watched this man torture his victims into madness, playing with them like a cat with a mouse. Defiling them. Tormenting them. Desecrating them. No, there would be no reprieve now that this vicious creature was under his wand.

Eventually, the screaming stopped when Dolohov lost consciousness, but still, Severus didn’t stop. The body at his feet twitched and juddered as though possessed, the viciousness of the magic he was unleashing proving an outlet for a good bit of his rage at the girl they’d come to defile. Severus didn’t let up until he was certain Dolohov’s heart had given out. Blood seeped from his mouth, his nose, his ears, and the corners of his eyes. The stench in the air suggested they weren’t the only orifices no longer functioning as they’d been designed.

Severus cast a charm over the body to be sure, confirming her was well and truly dead. When he was finished, he turned to Greyback, who looked very much dead but was likely deeply comatose. After a lifetime of evil, Severus saw no reason to spare the creature and he cast the Killing Charm again, and again over Greyback’s body, before resorting to summoning a silver dagger from Miss Granger’s house and using it to carve out the creature’s heart, using magic to crack open the ribcage before severing the heart from it’s tethers. Severus cast a Killing Curse directly into the still flesh just for good measure.

His task complete, Severus turned his attention to the girl in the garden. She was still breathing, so thank Merlin for small mercies. He couldn’t have dealt with her as a ghost for the next century or so until he kicked off. Sighing, weakened even more now and realising that for all that he’d gained enough strength during his recovery to go about his brewing and his gardening and fetching his groceries, he evidently wasn’t up to the taxation of a duel upon the body, Severus supposed he’d have to do something about Miss Granger.

Casting charms to clean her up, he levitated the bird-bath away and then levitated her prone form in through the backdoor of the house – conveniently left open. The fresh-tilled state of the garden beds and piles of weeds, not to mention the rather homely state of her clothing, suggested she’d been out for a spot of winter gardening despite the chilly weather, and obviously she’d left the door open for the wee beast she passed off for a cat, which Severus noticed, had evidently been punted by one of his former brethren. The cat’s prone, orange form lay in the garden under the window where he’d come to the defence of his mistress and befallen an ill fate.

Severus was too pre-occupied to check if the creature was breathing, but he rather hoped so, simply to avoid the blubbering he’d likely have to endure form the girl if her pet had been slaughtered. Getting her into the house, he levitated her as far as the couch before dropping her onto it and falling into an armchair himself. He was breathing heavily, and his head was spinning, dizzy and weak like he might join her in unconsciousness. Even knowing that the girl likely needed attention, for the time being, Severus had no choice but to surrender to the demands of his body and simply rest.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: *Stumbles in, grinning*
> 
> *flails with excitement to see you all*
> 
> *Shoves the chapter down on top of your morning newspaper*
> 
> *steals a sip of your coffee*
> 
> *scuttles away to write more*
> 
> xx-Kitten.

Hermione came awake with a groan, gagging at the stink of smelling salts and wincing at the all-encompassing agony suffusing her frame. Gods, she felt like she’d been hit by a bus twenty times over, and then stabbed a billion times with a rusty fork, before having her innards ripped out and used to strangle her. Her mouth tasted foul, like stale vomit, and she was shivering uncontrollably.

The dark form of a wizard looming over her had her recoiling in fear, backing up as far as she could before she realized she laid upon something soft and familiar. Her eyes zeroed in on the face scowling down at her and while it was - to say the least - a particularly unpleasant and extremely unfriendly face, it wasn’t the visage of one of her captors.

“Do you know where you are?” Severus Snape asked brusquely when she winced and clutched at her head but stopped trying to get away from him.

“My own living room?” Hermione guessed, her eyes leaving him to assess her surroundings and recognising the décor she’d carefully selected since taking up a flat of her own.

“Indeed,” Snape drawled. “Do you remember what happened?”

Hermione sighed, nodding and closing her eyes against the pain throbbing through her entire body with every beat of her heart.

“Dolohov, Greyback and Scabior,” she nodded. “Cruciatus. Though I have no idea how they got through my wards.”

“Dolohov was a curse-breaker before joining the Death Eater ranks,” Snape supplied mildly. “And the curse he used upon you in the Department of Mysteries that failed to kill you held an inherent tracking spell. Once he knew where you were, he simply sat out there picking at the protective wards until he was able to penetrate them.”

“Oh,” Hermione frowned. “I didn’t know that.”

“No, Albus didn’t want you informed of the tracking spell,” Snape sighed, turning from her and sauntering across to one of her armchairs where he sat wearily.

“Of course not,” Hermione muttered, thinking mutinous thoughts about the former Headmaster and his secretiveness. “I suppose if you’re here and I’m alive, the Death Eaters have been seen off?”

“Not exactly,” Snape answered and when Hermione opened her eyes in alarm, he waved a finger to the window that overlooked the back garden.

Bodies littered the grass, two of them desecrated beyond recognition. Hermione gasped, her stomach turning.

“Good Lord,” she muttered. “What happened? Did you do that?”

Snape didn’t bother to answer her, though the look on his face and the blood staining his robes – more casual than she’d ever seen him in – suggested he had.

“You murdered them?” Hermione whispered. “And you’re here. Did you carry me inside?”

“Levitated you,” he answered. “And yes, they’re dead. They won’t be returning to trouble you again, Miss Granger.”

“How did you get here?” Hermione asked.

He raised that damned eyebrow at her scornfully, looking at her like she was an imbecile, and Hermione coloured.

“How do you think?” he complained. “That much damage sustained in such a short timespan resonates through the bond tethering us, Miss Granger.”

“Oh,” Hermione answered thickly, unsure what else to say. “Erm… I hope you weren’t in the middle of anything time sensitive.”

He snorted.

“I daresay the batch of Pepper-Up Potions I was brewing for St. Mungos might be ruined,” he said. “But I shan’t be subjected to your ghost haunting me for the next several decades, so I’m comfortable with the sacrifice.”

“That’s… a very pragmatic way of looking at it, sir,” Hermione offered weakly, at a loss at how to proceed.

When last she’d seen him, he’d been vibrating with fury and had forcibly removed himself from her presence, lest he murder her. And now here he was, sounding tired and impatient more than a year later, having just murdered three men to save her life.

“How are you feeling?” he asked eventually in the silence that followed while Hermione tried to focus on not throwing up from the pain coursing through her.

“Everything aches and stings at the same time,” she said.

“Throbbing?” he guessed.

“In time with my pulse,” Hermione agreed, realising he must be well versed in the effects of the cruciatus on a human body. She wondered how many times he might’ve endured it himself.

“Have you any Flu Potion?” he asked.

“Probably,” Hermione said. “Does that help?”

“Dulls the ache, in my experience. A strong pain-relief potion will soothe the throbbing, and if possible, a Vitality Potion will alleviate the sting.”

“I think I have all three in my medicine cupboard,” Hermione nodded.

She frowned, searching her pockets for her wand before recalling that she’d been disarmed of the weapon out on the lawn.

“Shall I fetch it?” Snape offered, surprising her with the politeness of the gesture.

“They took my wand,” Hermione sighed. “Otherwise I’d summon it.”

“You won’t be able to stand or do magic for some time yet, Miss Granger,” he told her. “The medicine cupboard?”

“In the bathroom,” Hermione answered. “Down the hall on the right. There’s a wooden box of potions and medical supplies in the cupboard under the sink.”

Snape sighed audibly before rising to his feet to fetch it and Hermione watched him go, noting the slowness of his gait and the evident exhaustion of his movements. Again, she wondered how many times he’d endured the curse himself and had to drag himself home to lick his wounds, unaided. She wondered how his recuperation would be set-back by this. She’d been intimately aware of him drawing on her vitality throughout the year as he healed, subconscious though it had undoubtedly been, but now she could feel that it was his strength pouring into her that allowed her to sit up and force her body upright.

“Stop moving,” he commanded as he returned carrying the box. “Your encounter has sorely taxed your strength, and mine as a result, and I hadn’t regained enough of it to endure quite as stoically as would be preferred. The less you move, the less energy you expend, and the more likely I am to remain upright, rather than passed out on that couch beside you.”

Hermione nodded.

“Right,” she muttered, taking the potions from him when he sat beside her, opened the box, and began handing her the neatly labelled vials without bothering to check those labels. She supposed he must be so used to recognising all three common medicinal treatments for minor ailments that he knew them by sight alone.

Unstoppering each one, Hermione downed all three he’d spoken of before accepting a second pain-relief potion when he offered it to her, evidently aware of how weak she felt. She was trembling in her seat and she was beginning to see stars.

“Oh, I think I’d better lay back down,” Hermione said, fumbling the last vial back to him after she drank it.

“Spots?” he guessed.

“Stars,” she admitted.

“Chew on this,” he said, retrieving a small glass vial from his pocket and unscrewing the lid.

Hermione frowned at the shrivelled green leaf that looked rather like a tongue of aloe, it’s waxy texture diminished by the age and dehydration.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Peruvian Starthorn,” he answered. “Relieves vertigo, nausea, and the sensation of seeing stars.”

“Why do you have a jar of it in your pocket?” Hermione frowned at him, accepting the herb and chewing it delicately before finding it rather more resistant to biting than she’d imagined. In fact, chewing on it required use of her molars, and incurred the feel of chewing a meaty steak that was rather beyond well done.

“I’ve had need of it since regaining the ability to rise from bed, unaided,” he answered dryly, surprising her with the honesty of his answer.

“Right,” she muttered again, her cheeks flushing at her own stupid question when she _knew_ he’d been recovering from a terrible near-death experience all year. “Erm… thank you.”

He didn’t answer, though he did move off the couch to allow her the chance to lie down once more. Hermione was surprised when he moved to the floor beside the cushions where she reclined, leaning his back against the couch and tipping his head back to rest on the cushion by her shoulder. He _must_ be exhausted if he was willing to sit so close, and to appear so vulnerable.

“Your beast is still in the garden,” he sighed, tucking the jar back into his pocket. “I believe it attempted to come to your rescue and was kicked into the wall. I’m uncertain if it lives.”

“Crookshanks?” she gasped, making to rise again.

“ _Don’t_ try to get up,” he growled, using the coffee table to pull himself to his feet. “I’ll fetch the damn thing.”

He stumbled slightly on his way out of the room, catching himself heavily in the doorway and Hermione frowned, seeing him brought so low. She waited tiredly while he fetched Crookshanks, watching him returning carrying the orange bundle.

“It’s alive,” he informed her. “Though I expect rather bruised.”

“Is he conscious?” Hermione asked.

“Yes,” Snape answered. “Might have a broken leg.”

He sighed, sitting back down on the edge of her couch when she reached for her familiar, and casting a charm over the cat. He muttered something too quiet for her to hear before one of his large hands smoothed over Crookshanks thick fur, pinning him down before casting several quick healing charms. Crookshanks yowled in protest, pained by the spells designed to fix him, and he hissed angrily at Snape before rising and scampering out of the room in the direction of her bedroom, evidently planning to lick his wounds in solitude.

“Ungrateful creature,” Snape sighed, shaking his head. “You should rest, Miss Granger. Your injuries are taxing us both.”

“So should you,” she answered quietly. “If I shuffle over and make room here on the couch, are you going to be painful about it?”

“Miss Granger,” he warned, sounding horrified by the very idea.

“Need I remind you, sir, that I once straddled you and performed CPR including mouth-to-mouth after forcing a bezoar down your gullet just a little over a year and a half ago?” Hermione asked mildly.

“I was unaware of that,” he said, turning to frown down at her in surprise.

“Oh,” she said. “I assumed you remembered, since you remembered the other spells and things I did to revive you and keep you alive.”

“Evidently my memory is not fully intact from the incident,” he allowed, eyeing her face before glancing at the space on the pillow beside her.

Hermione didn’t bother offering again or explaining. She simply shuffled further back against the backrest of the couch, burrowing into it as much a possible to free up space on the cushions. She’d purchased a rather large and luxurious couch – one with having Hagrid stop by to visit in mind, in fact – so there was plenty of room for the two of them to share. If they each laid on their side, they might not even have to touch.

“Miss Granger,” Snape warned, scowling at her though there was no heat to the admonishment give that he sounded minutes from passing out.

“Just rest, Professor,” Hermione sighed. “Worry about the logistics and immoralities later.”

With that said, she closed her eyes against the pain still resonating through her and left the decision entirely up to him. If he wanted to stay, he could. If he wanted to go… well… he’d probably get ten steps and collapse in the hallway, by the look of him. If he really wanted to be a stubborn git and faint in the corridor, that was his prerogative, she supposed.

Despite that, a little huff of amusement left her when he muttered several swear words before flopping down on the cushions beside her and groaning like even that was too much effort. Hermione slipped into a pain induced sleep with Severus Snape at her side and a smile on her face.


	6. Chapter 6

Hermione woke several hours later with something heavy and ungrateful resting on her chest and repeatedly headbutting her chin. Groaning, she opened her eyes to a face full of whiskers.

“Crooks,” Hermione grumbled at the evidently hungry feline.

It was still dark, she noted, and the house was cold. So cold, in fact, that she’d snuggled into the warm body lying beside her and Hermione froze, her heart skipping a beat and her stomach flipping in fear when she realised she had a second, heavy and ungrateful creature resting on her chest. Stretched out on her back, she had Crookshanks standing on the middle of her chest, and a heavy head of dark hair pillowed on her breasts. Her arms were curled around the shoulders belonging to that head and Hermione’s whole body tensed in shock and concern.

“Not good,” she whispered, realising that any moment now, Severus Snape was going to awaken with his head on her chest and Hermione doubted he was going to be overly thrilled about it.

“Meow,” Crookshanks complained loudly, shifting his paws on her chest and flicking his tail back and forth in annoyance.

“No, Crookshanks,” Hermione whispered. “Stop. Get off. You’re too heavy for this.”

Another pitiful yowl escaped the contemptible feline, before he arched his back and kneaded her flesh with his paws. He also made a point of moving his back paws around until he managed to kick Snape several times, and to squat on the man’s head instead.

“Damn it, you little beast!” Hermione whispered, reaching quickly for the cat, thinking to lift him off Snape before he could be sent flying for waking him.

“Where…?” Snape’s voice suddenly invaded the dark, gravelly with sleep as he tensed against her now that her arms weren’t curled around him.

“Meerrowoow,” Crookshanks yowled again, even louder as Hermione tried to lift him off the man with little luck. She got two front paws and a collections of claws to the face for her trouble when he almost overbalanced as Snape jerked in surprise at the sound.

“Where the hell…?” Snape growled.

Crookshanks meowed plaintively again.

“Erebus, not now,” Snape grumbled, burrowing his face back into her boobs as though planning to return to sleep.

His nose bumped one of her nipples, startling her, and Hermione squeaked quietly in shock. She _felt_ Snape freeze. Sensing the danger, Crookshanks used the back of Snape’s head and Hermione’s cheeks for his springboard as he bounced away, scampering across the room where he couldn’t be caught in the crossfire. An inhuman sound of annoyance escaped Snape before he jerked his head from her chest and twisted quickly to look at her, his eyes narrowed hatefully.

Hermione’s now empty hands – which moments ago had been attempting to wrangle her cat – hung limply in the air near her face. She didn’t know what to do with them considering that Snape was well and truly lying on top of her. With his head lifted it was evident he’d also slung an arm across her stomach, and thrown one of his legs over both of hers, clinging to her as he laid on his side to avoid tumbling off the back of the couch.

“Granger?” he asked, squinting in the low light from the burned-down fireplace.

“Yes, sir,” Hermione said quietly, nodding and resorting to burying her hands in her own hair to made it look like she hadn’t been cuddling him. Right at that moment, Crookshanks yowled a long, echoing complaint from the doorway to the kitchen where his food dish was, and Hermione winced.

“Not now, Erebus,” Snape grumbled again, narrowed his eyes further and squinting in the cat’s direction.

“Erebus?” Hermione asked, frowning.

“My cat,” Snape muttered, his eyes darting back to her face before he glanced down at where he’d been pillowing his cheek, and then lower, taking stock of how intertwined they were.

“You have a cat?” Hermione asked, surprised to learn he had a familiar.

Snape nodded, and Hermione didn’t think she’d ever seen him look so disoriented.

“Oh. Well, he’s probably hungry. But you’re at my place, sir. That’s Crookshanks yowling because he wants his dinner.”

“Your place?” Snape asked, and when he turned his eyes back to her, Hermione noted the wrinkles on his cheek from the fabric of her shirt, his hair mussed and his expression one of confusion.

“Are you alright, Professor?” Hermione frowned. “You’re at my flat, remember? We both depleted ourselves after those Death Eaters showed up and tortured me.”

“Shit!” Snape grumbled unhappily, lowering his face back to her chest and burrowing it between her breasts like he wanted to hide from the world. Crookshanks complained again at the idea that they were getting comfortable rather than feeding him.

Hermione shushed the cat, unsure what to do with the wizard on top of her.

“I thought that was a nightmare,” Snape confessed quietly into her chest.

“Not this time,” Hermione sighed. “Not a morning person, Snape?”

“It’s not morning,” he said, burrowing into her even more and Hermione shivered at the spirals of warmth and magic that curled through her at the touch. “It’s still dark. And it’s cold. And the cat is complaining.”

Crookshanks agreed loudly and Hermione giggled.

“Alright, Crookshanks,” Hermione chuckled. “Just hold your horses, could you? Sir, if you could just slide sideways, I’ll feed him, so he stops complaining.”

Snape’s limbs tightened around her and he burrowed into her even more, evidently not liking the idea and Hermione wondered what had gotten into him. She’d always imagined him the type of man to immediately jolt awake, and to maintain as much dignity at all times. He held her tightly for a long minute in silence before sighing heavily and releasing her, making her wonder if he was feeling alright or if he still imagined himself to be asleep.

Free, Hermione sat up quickly, jostling him a little when she stretched her arms over her head and twisted left, and then right, her body stiff from being laid upon, and from sleeping on the couch rather than in her bed. Gripping the back of the couch, Hermione levered herself up, her stomach flipping nervously as she threw a leg over her former professor and had to hop a little in order to rise to her feet. Snape groaned again, rolling to his stomach and snuggling down into the warm spot she’d left behind while Hermione stood unsteadily.

Her head swam and she realised she was still impacted by the magic depletion; her body aching from the torture. Blearily she stumbled into the kitchen and fed Crookshanks on autopilot. She should just go back to bed, she thought, shaking her head and running a hand through her hair before turning on the light. She knew she’d feel better and refuel her magic faster if she fixed herself something to eat. Rummaging through the fridge, she located the large block of chocolate she kept on hand for emergencies, breaking off a large piece for herself a gobbling it down before looking over her shoulder into the lounge room where Snape was fussing with the cushions, evidently uncomfortable now that she wasn’t there for him to cling to.

Breaking off another large piece, Hermione set it on the counter briefly to put the kettle on, her mouth dry and her tongue fuzzy, leaving her with a craving for tea. While it boiled, she carried the chocolate to Snape and nudged him, offering it to him when he rolled to his back and opened his eyes to glare at her. His exhaustion was evident in the bruises under his dark eyes and in the way he still squinted at her.

“Eat this,” she instructed. “You’ll feel better.”

He huffed at her bossiness, but accepted the chocolate, taking a large bite while she watched.

Satisfied, Hermione returned to the kitchen, rubbing her eyes before fixing two cups and pouring them both tea.

“How do you take your tea, sir?” she asked.

“One sugar,” he answered, and Hermione looked over her shoulder to see he’d risen to his feet too and followed her to the kitchen, looking rumpled and sleep deprived and tired.

“Any milk?” she offered.

“None,” he answered, accepting the cup from her when she handed it to him.

Hermione watched him bring it to his lips and drink greedily before she did the same.

“You didn’t have to get up, sir,” Hermione said. “I could’ve brought you the tea…”

He grunted and finished his mouthful before looking toward the garden.

“We’d better clean up,” he answered quietly.

“Clean up?” she asked, looking around the tidy kitchen in confusion.

“The bodies,” he reminded her, nodding toward the garden and Hermione frowned.

“Oh,” she said. “I… yes… I suppose you’re right.”

“Do you mean to report their attack?” Snape asked, frowning at her.

“Um… I… Do you think I should?” she asked, realising that his having killed them when they weren’t attacking him, and this no longer being a time of war technically qualified their deaths as murder by his hand.

“No,” Snape answered.

“But they’re dead,” she said. “We have to… what do we do with the bodies? Won’t the Aurors keep looking for them if they don’t know they’ve been killed? Wouldn’t that be a waste of resources?”

“Take a picture and submit it anonymously to the Ministry if you’re worried about that,” Snape replied quietly, shaking his head.

“And the… corpses?” Hermione frowned at him.

“Will need to be disposed of.”

“How?” she asked.

“Transfiguration into something easy to conceal and easy to carry would be best,” he said. “Then you can do what you like with them. That, or they’d make excellent fertiliser for your garden…”

“Oh, my god,” Hermione breathed, horrified.

Snape shot her a nasty smirk, evidently amused by his own suggestion and by her horror. She was reminded with startling clarity that he was a dark wizard and had been a Death Eater and committed terrible crimes in that service. She’d killed her own share of people during the war, so the act itself wasn’t what horrified her. She’d been attacked in her own home, after all, and she wasn’t a particularly charitable witch, nor one prone to forgiveness of those who wronged her. She could hardly claim to be saddened by the deaths of the three men who’d assaulted her, but the thought of turning them into fertiliser for her garden was horrifying.

“No?” he asked sardonically, raising that infernal eyebrow at her.

Hermione shook her head.

“No matter,” he shrugged. “My garden will be grateful for the blood and bone, I should think. And werewolf parts are so useful in potion making.”

“You can’t…” Hermione protested.

“They’re already dead, Miss Granger,” Snape reminded her unkindly. “Anything we do to them now is no different to dissembling a collection of potion ingredients; no different from many of your lessons.”

“They’re human beings,” Hermione argued, feeling ill.

“Well… one and a half of them are, anyway,” he rolled his eyes.

“One and a half?” Hermione asked, her eyes wide.

“Scabior tried to flee. He got splinched mid-apparation when I hit him with the killing curse,” he shrugged.

Hermione’s stomach turned at the thought, recalling the horrible sight of Ron when he’d splinched during the war.

“Oh, god, is he…?”

“Still out there?” Snape asked. “Part of him. The rest are Merlin only knows where.”

“What if a muggle finds the remains?” Hermione squeaked.

“They’ll have a gruesome case to solve,” Snape shrugged. “You have no interest in their remains for your uses?”

“You’re actually going to… to…” Hermione asked, too sick to finish the statement.

“Knowing all that I know of the things they have done to people, both living and dead, Miss Granger, I will take quite a large amount of joy from defiling their corpses for more useful employment now that they’re dead, themselves. When you’ve watched such vile men rape the corpses of young women; seen that werewolf devour what was left afterward; it is hard to much care what becomes of them. And as I said, werewolf parts are hard to come by and extremely useful in the art of potion making.”

Hermione covered her mouth, shaking her head and feeling sick to her stomach. Snape furrowed his brow at her as though annoyed by her reaction.

“I take it I can’t count on your assistance in cleaning them up?” he asked idly, and Hermione’s eyes widened in horror and a little fear.

Snape sighed, shaking his head and setting aside his cup before he stalked out of the kitchen, and then out of the house, letting himself into her back garden and lighting his wand to see. Unsure what else to do, Hermione followed him, and she felt sick to her stomach when her eyes landed on what was left of Scabior.

“Fuck!” Snape cursed, holding his wand aloft and looking around quickly, searching for something.

“What?” Hermione asked, lighting her own and moving closer.

Scabiors remains were bloodied and red upon the ground in the middle of the lawn, and Dolohov’s prone form laid by the edge of the garden she’d been digging when they’d invaded her home.

“Greyback’s gone!” Snape snarled. “ _Lumos solem_.”

The great ball of magical sunlight illuminated the entire garden and Hermione looked around for the third body he spoke of, horrified by the large pool of blood on the grass, and a trail of red leading away from the scene of the murders toward her back fence.

“I thought you killed him,” Hermione frowned, watching Snape stride to the back fence – which bore some bloody hands prints and smears of crimson, turned brown where it’d dried.

“I did,” Snape growled. “I used the Killing curse multiple times _and_ I removed his heart with a silver dagger. He should’ve died!”

“The one from my potion set?” Hermione asked.

Snape nodded.

“It’s not pure silver,” Hermione sighed. “It’s titanium inlaid with silver. The marketers making them claim that the tendency of silver to tarnish contaminates potions if you don’t clean them often and thoroughly.”

“Urgh!” Snape made a sound of disgust, as though the very idea of using anything other than a silver dagger to prepare potion ingredients was sacrilege.

“You really think he’d survived several curses and the removal of his heart to pick up the severed organ and shove it back in his chest to get away?” Hermione asked.

“Do you have another explanation for his missing corpse?” Snape asked, returning to the other two. “Ah. As I suspected. He even stopped for a snack before he left.”

“What?!” Hermione gasped, hurrying over.

“Scabior’s heart is missing too,” Snape pointed out. “Consumption of a wizard’s heart is said to sustain werewolves and revive them even from certain death. Dolohov’s is likely missing as well.”

Hermione hurried over, using her foot to roll the corpse of her torturer, revealing a ragged hole punched through his chest cavity, his heart obviously missing.

“But you removed _his_ heart,” Hermione frowned. “You said you…”

“Without using a pure silver dagger, it wouldn’t have killed him.”

“How can he live with his heart removed?” she frowned.

“I left it next to his corpse,” Snape shrugged his shoulder, running an annoyed hand through his hair. “And given the form he was in, technically, I only removed his human heart.”

“Meaning?” Hermione frowned up at him in horror.

“He’s a werewolf,” he said, glancing at her as though she was a moron.

“So?” Hermione frowned.

“So, he has a lycanthrope heart, too. I forgot to remove that.”

“He had two hearts?” Hermione gasped.

“Yes,” he repeated. “He’s a werewolf.”

Hermione blinked, not appreciating the expression he wore that suggested he’d conversed with rocks in possession of more intelligence than she was currently displaying.

“But he wasn’t in wolf form,” she frowned.

“No, but the wolf form would’ve taken over when his human heart was removed,” Snape sighed. “This hole was made with claws, not human hands.”

“I thought he’d have had to be in wolf form to be in possession of his wolf-heart,” Hermione frowned.

“So did I,” Snape answered. “But given that his corpse is not here, and that my other two victims are missing their heart’s, there is no other logical reason for Greyback to have gotten up and walked away after what I did to him.”

“Oh, god,” Hermione breathed, turning away and hurrying to the garden before the chocolate and tea she’d ingested made a reappearance.

“Get a hold of yourself, Miss Granger,” Snape commanded without sympathy.

When she wiped her mouth and turned back to him, he had transfigured both corpses into two large bones that made her think of dinosaur excavation sites instead of wizards. Next, he shrank them and slipped them into his pocket. A third sweep of his wand removed the blood and gore from their crime scene, leaving her garden pristine, but for the overturned birdbath and Hermione realised how horribly easy it was for a witch to get away with murder.

She stared at him in confusion and horror when he looked at her expectantly.

“What?” she asked warily.

Snape raised his eyebrows.

“Go and pack your things, Miss Granger,” he said, sounding, again, as though he believed her to be stupid.

“What? Why?” she frowned.

“Fenrir Greyback lives,” Snape answered. “And after what I did to him, I expect he’ll be seeking revenge. He knows how to get to this house now. You cannot remain here if you don’t wish to receive him again – next time potentially without me to intervene and protect you from him.”

“What?” Hermione asked blankly, everything taking place too fast for her sluggish mind to follow.

Her head was pounding just from standing and walking around.

“Are you being purposely dense?” Snape asked, frowning at her.

“No… I… You want me to pack?” she asked.

“Unless you wish him to return and eat _your_ heart. Likely after defiling your body in ways I cannot begin to adequately describe, given the true horror of their nature,” Snape said.

“But… where will I… I don’t have… This is my home,” she frowned.

“And now it is the scene of a murder, your torture, and the place to which Greyback will return to finish what he started. With Dolohov dead, they will no longer be able to track you, but if you’re still here when he returns, he will simply wait for the full moon, cross your wards as a wolf, and devour you. This is no longer your home. Pack your things.”

“Where am I supposed to go?” Hermione asked. “I sold my parents’ house.”

“You cannot stay with a friend for a time?” Snape asked.

“Who?” she scoffed. “Harry? The guy training to be an Auror? What would I offer as explanation for not staying here? ‘Oh, sorry Harry, I’ll just camp on your couch for a few days because _a werewolf Snape failed to kill is going to eat me_?’”

Snape frowned.

“Weasley?” he suggested.

“Ron and I aren’t on speaking terms, at present,” she admitted uncomfortably.

“The Burrow?”

“Still requires an explanation for my sudden upheaval,” she pointed out, noting with some concern the way he strode back into the house and began flicking his wand at things, shrinking her furniture and levitating her books and dishes and everything else into a large trunk he found in the cupboard under the stairs.

“You are not making this any easier, Miss Granger,” he frowned when she put her hands on her hips and glared at him. “Stay in a hotel if you really have nowhere else to go.”

“This is ridiculous,” Hermione complained. “I can’t just move into a hotel. What am I supposed to do? Just put the house on the market and stay there until I find something else?”

“Yes,” Snape answered coolly.

“You can’t be serious.”

“I am,” he said bluntly when even her bed and everything from the top floor shrank and danced in a long line down the stairs, folding itself all into her trunk just like she’d once seen a wizard do in a children’s film when she’d been just a girl.

“You need to stop,” Hermione said, leaning heavily against the wall when the display of magic he was performing began eating into her barely regained strength.

“Miss Granger,” he said sternly. “Do you wish to die?”

She frowned at him.

“Of course not,” she huffed.

“Then stop moaning, and collect your feline,” he answered.

“No hotel will take Crooks, too,” she argued, dizzy once more.

“The Leaky Cauldron takes familiars,” he frowned at her.

“I’d still have to explain me sudden presence in a hotel shortly after purchasing a lovely home, Snape,” Hermione reminded him.

Snape emitted another inhuman growl of complaint and stomped over to her as the last of her belongings folded into her trunk and closed with a snap.

“You don’t have a choice, Miss Granger, and unless you envision yourself shacking up with me until a new residence can be purchased, that is what you will be doing!” he said firmly, catching hold of her upper arm and hauling her toward the door while Crookshanks hurried after them, alarmed by the missing furniture and mistreatment of his mistress.

Hermione stooped to collect the feline into her arms, though doing so left her lightheaded and seeing spots.

“Didn’t I read somewhere that close contact with one’s bond-mate was better for strength replenishment?” she asked innocently, lifting her eyes to meet his gaze when he froze, realising what he’d just said about living together.

“Unlikely,” he answered stiffly.

“Didn’t we prove the truth of that notion when you woke up snuggling your face between my boobs and once again able to perform this kind of magic, even though a scant few hours ago, neither of us could walk?” she offered, trying not to smile when he narrowed his eyes on her hatefully.

“Miss Granger, it would be a mistake to misconstrue my actions today for anything more than a desire to avoid being haunted by your ghost for the next several decades,” he said coldly. “Had your strength not been drawing on mine, I’d have left you to your fate this afternoon.”

“If that was true, you wouldn’t have packed all my things out of fear of Greyback returning to have his wicked way with me, Snape,” Hermione pointed out primly.

“You’re not staying with me,” he warned her. “I have yet to forgive you for landing us in this mess in the first place, Granger.”

“It was your suggestion that I stay with you, sir,” Hermione argued, smiling winningly now. “And doing so would arouse the least suspicion about my relocation because no one knows you’re still alive, so no one will think to look for me at your place.”

“Greyback knows, after today,” he pointed out.

“No one who wouldn’t seek to make a fuss about the idea, as opposed to seeking to kill you, sir,” Hermione clarified. “Were I to show up at the Burrow and claim I have to move because three Death Eaters invaded my yard, I’d need to explain how I got away with all of my belongings, who saved me, what had become of those Death Eaters _and_ why it was that you – a man supposed to have been dead – happened to know the exact moment I was attacked _and_ sought to rescue me.”

Snape curled his lip.

“And the only logical explanation I could offer would be the truth, Professor,” Hermione went only slyly. “I am, after all, not a particularly gifted liar.”

“You’re a vile manipulator,” he accused, looking displeased.

“I learned from the best,” she said, eyeing him indicatively and he made another of those impatient sounds that frightened her; all the more animalistic for the damage done to his throat during Nagini’s attack.

“If you get in my way…” he threatened darkly.

Hermione laughed.

“What are you going to do, _soulmate_?” she teased. “Kill me?”

Snape’s expression was thunderous, but Hermione just laughed and reached over to tuck her hand through the crook of his elbow while he picked up her trunk. He scowled down at her hatefully before twisting sharply to the left, disapparating them both, along with Crookshanks and her overstuffed trunk, with a resounding crack.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: *evil cackling in the distance*
> 
> *springs out from behind the couch*
> 
> *giggles while you spill your wine in surprise*
> 
> *waves the chapter invitingly in recompense*
> 
> *scampers off, toting other chapters for other fics you just might be excited to read*
> 
> *calls over shoulder "It's going to be a busy week!"*
> 
> *more cackling*
> 
> xx-Kitten.

Hermione’s knees buckled under her upon impact when they landed in a small back garden she’d never seen before and only her grip on Snape’s elbow saved her when Crookshanks leaped from her arms as she began to fall.

“Get a hold of yourself, Miss Granger,” Snape scowled, shaking her off him when she got her feet under her again.

“Sorry,” she apologised automatically, frowning up at him.

“Wait here,” he said, setting down her trunk and striding further down the length of the garden toward the very back corner.

He disappeared from view in the dark, and Hermione heard him swearing from somewhere, and a metallic screech sounded before two distinct plops met her ears. She frowned and waited for him to return, noticing that he used a cleaning charm on his hands as he walked.

“What did you do?” she asked. “Where… where did you put them?”

It occurred to her when he turned out his cloak pocket for any debris that he’d disposed of the bones he’d transfigured Scabior and Dolohov’s remains into.

“In the septic tank,” Snape answered evenly, daring her to laugh.

“Oh my god,” she breathed, horrified and yet sadistically pleased at the idea. “That’s…”

“Fitting,” he nodded in agreement. “Still better than they deserve.”

A slightly hysterical giggle escaped her, and Hermione covered her mouth, trying to stifle the sound before she caught the flash of his teeth in the moonlight and realised he was smiling viciously.

“Come on,” he said, picking up her trunk and carrying it up the path and into the house.

Hermione followed after him, focusing her will to make it up the stairs without falling on her face.

“Exhausted?” Snape guessed, flicking on the lights to reveal his tidy kitchen.

“Yes,” Hermione admitted. “I could sleep for a week.”

“Are you seeing stars, again?” he asked, evidently aware of how weak she felt, likely indicating she was drawing on his strength.

“Yes,” Hermione admitted.

Snape set down her trunk next to the stove and fished into his pocked for the jar of starthorn he’d given her earlier, handing one over her to chew on before taking one for himself.

“We should eat something,” Hermione suggested, chewing tiredly. “Refuel. And the rest.”

“It’s the middle of the night,” he nodded in agreement.

Hermione watched him open the fridge and withdraw the ingredient to fix them both a cold roast beef and pickle sandwich. She offered to help but he waved her away, nodding to the seat at the small kitchen table. Hermione sank into it gratefully, clutching her aching head and closing her eyes.

“Erebus, don’t even think about it,” Snape said a short while later, still making their sandwiches.

Hermione opened her eyes to find Crookshanks at her feet, and an enormous black cat sat fluffed up and hissing in the doorway. He was the biggest cat she’d ever laid eyes on, his coat thick and luxurious, fluffier than Crooks, and much larger.

Crookshanks growled in warning.

“Crooks, be nice,” Hermione reminded the half-kneazel. “You’re a guest on his turf, remember.”

Erebus growled in return and Snape handed Hermione the sandwich he’d fixed for her. In a flurry, both cats rushed each other, growling and hissing, swiping viciously.

“Let them go,” Snape advised when Hermione tried to stop her cat from causing trouble. “They’ll sort it out and learn to live with each other.”

Hermione sighed, nodding as Crookshanks bolted through the door and deeper into the house with Erebus on his tail.

“He’s a big cat,” Hermione commented.

“He’s as unfriendly as his master, too,” Snape commented, eyeing her coldly, evidently uncomfortable having her in his space.

“You’re not going to growl and chase me around the house, are you?” Hermione asked. “I think I’ll fall down if I try to run away.”

He narrowed his eyes, evidently not appreciating her humour and Hermione sighed, finishing the rest of her sandwich in silence. When she was done, he flicked his wand at the plates to wash them up and put away the ingredients before surprising her and offering her his hand to help her to her feet.

“Did you really read that physical contact allows for faster repletion?” he asked quietly.

Hermione nodded tiredly, holding his gaze though her eyes stung with exhaustion and she wanted nothing more than to fall into bed. Snape sighed heavily before his shoulders drooped, his own weariness evident when he hung his head.

“Come, then,” he said, turning away and striding out of the kitchen.

Hermione didn’t protest, she simply followed after him, trailing in his wake as he turned off the lights in the kitchen and muttered a few strengthening charms for the wards protecting the house at the back door. She was surprised when he took her hand in the dark, leading her through the house though she couldn’t see a thing and up a staircase that creaked with every step.

“Get out of those jeans and gardening clothes,” he told her when they reached the upper level and moonlight peeked through what she realised was the window in his bedroom.

“I… all of my things are still in my trunk,” she said weakly, frowning at the very idea of stripping in front of him.

“Take this,” he said, moving over and pressing something soft and well-worn into her hands. Hermione held it up, realising it must be one of his old undershirts.

“Right,” she muttered, thinking about protesting but deciding she was simply too tired to care. It wasn’t like he could see anything in the dark anyway.

She stripped out of her jeans and her gardening jumper quickly, frowning in the dark before turning her back to Snape and unsnapping the clasp on her bra, too, unwilling to sleep in it when it’d begun cutting into her. She gasped quietly at the pain in her shoulder when she managed it, the effects of the cruciatus curse making themselves known once again. Shrugging into the shirt he’d given her, she was amused to note that it fell to mid-thigh on her, engulfing her small frame entirely and hiding her body from his view.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer I sleep in a spare room, Snape?” Hermione asked when he crossed to the bed and peeled open the covers wearily, looking utterly exhausted.

“You said contact helps,” he answered. “If we’re both to be useless until repleted, it stands to reason that we ought to achieve repletion as soon as possible. And it’s not as though we didn’t sleep side by side on you couch, Miss Granger.”

“Right,” she muttered, following his lead to the other side of the bed and opening the covers before sliding inside.

The linens smelled like him, she noticed, savouring strongly of dried herbs, but the soft mattress and warm blanket was welcome in the winter-frigid bedroom since his exploits at her place hadn’t allowed from proper heating of the house throughout the day.

Snape climbed into bed on the other side and Hermione laid still for a long moment before she felt his hand moving across the sheets in her direction.

“Contact,” she muttered, rolling in his direction and shuffling toward him, taking his hand when he touched her hip.

He didn’t say anything else as she shuffled across the bed until she could press herself against him, burrowing her face into his chest and curling an arm over his middle. After the way they’d awoken on the couch, it wasn’t an uncomfortable experience, though Hermione noted with some amusement that he remained tense for several long minutes.

“Was this level of weariness what you suffered while I recuperated?” he asked curiously just as she was beginning to drift off.

“No,” Hermione murmured quietly. “I was tired for a long time, and sore, but never this bone weary.”

He didn’t say anything else and Hermione sighed softly, snuggling a little closer to him. After so long spent on high alert to have him show up and attack her in a fury over their linked souls, it seemed odd to feel so comfortable in his embrace. She’d read that contact was supposed to bring repletion faster, but nothing about feeling calm and content.

“Do you truly think Greyback will be hunting me now?” she asked as her thoughts inevitably circled back to the attack; echoes of the pain she’d endured beneath the touch of the curse stinging her muscles even now.

“Yes,” Snape said. “Fenrir Greyback was obsessed with you when last I was forced to endure his company, during the war. As was Dolohov.”

“Do you think he’ll find me here?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “The tracking spell they used to locate you in the first place was imbedded in Dolohov’s curse on you from when you were sixteen. Without him, Greyback will have to rely on gossip, stalking, and his lycanthropic senses like heightened smell to track you down. It might be in your best interests to take some time off from whatever work you do to occupy your time. I expected they will have tracked you to your office, first.”

“I’m on Christmas vacation,” she answered softly. “No one will miss me until at least the 5th of January.”

“You’re not staying here that long,” he warned.

Hermione giggled despite the impending oblivion.

“But professor,” she said reasonably. “Physical contact helps us heal faster.”

She fell asleep to the sound of his cursing colourfully in what sounded like several different languages.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: *scurries in under cover of darkness*
> 
> *giggles as she slips the chapter into your dress pocket*
> 
> *moves some of your knick-knacks around to see if you notice*
> 
> *melts away into the night*
> 
> xx-Kitten.

For three days, they only emerged from the cocoon in the bedroom for potty breaks and to feed themselves and their pair of obnoxious felines when they grew too insistent demanding sustenance. They barely spoke to one another during that time, beyond Hermione asking for directions to the loo, and grunting at each other to move over, or get off, or to ask if they wanted a certain condiment when they scrounged together something passably edible.

Hermione ached all over, her body a myriad of agonies in the aftermath of the torture, and for the second time in her life she thought it heinously unfair that after enduring and surviving the vicious and unparalleled agony of the Cruciatus curse, she also had to endure the aftermath. Much like any victim of a car crash or other terrible accident, the abused muscles and bones in her body that had locked and spasmed and cramped throughout the torture made known their woes at being called upon to protect her most vital organs. Sometimes she wondered after incidents like this if the reason people suffered was because the nervous system chose to punish the body for daring to put itself in such danger, forcing sufferance for days afterward as a means of being taught a lesson.

On the fourth day when Hermione woke to the trill of some brave bird that hadn’t flown south for the winter, snow blanketed the windowsill and the garden beyond it.

“Too bright,” an increasingly familiar voice grumbled at her back where he laid spooning her and Hermione hummed in agreement, squinting at the window and vaguely recalling going to it and opening the curtain when she’d gotten up to wee during the night.

“It’s snowing,” Hermione replied quietly, her body less sore today that it had been since the attack, her mind clearer. The sense of wading through fog every time she awoke had faded, and she felt surprisingly energized at the sight of the softly falling snow drifting past the window.

“What?” Snape growled, lifting his head from where he’d burrowed his face into her thick curls, his nose pressed to the back of her neck. “Snowing?”

“Mmm,” Hermione hummed affirmatively.

“Ah, shit!” Snape cursed, rolling away quickly and sitting up.

“What is it?” Hermione asked, peering over her shoulder as he winced his way to his feet and began turning in circles, looking for trousers and a jumper.

“The greenhouse needs warming charms,” he said. “Or I’ll lose my hot-house herbs and plants for brewing.”

He charged out of the room on unsteady feet, his lank hair a bird’s-nest of three-days’ bedhead.

“Do you need help?” Hermione called after him, already hearing his feet on the stairs.

“No!” he hollered back, and Hermione shook her head when the chorus of yowling complaints started as he entered the kitchen below.

The sound of a door opening and then slamming followed by muffled cursing from outside the window made Hermione laugh until the grumpy felines realised that she was still abed.

“Oh, don’t start,” Hermione complained as Crookshanks and Erebus charged into the room, bounding up onto the bed and both meowing loudly at her, wanting attention and food.

Evidence of their fierce skirmishes littered both felines, with bitten ears, scratched noses, and patchy fur showing off the fact that they hadn’t learned to tolerate each other, aside from when they temporarily set aside their enmity to gang-up on their exhausted humans, demanding food in a joint effort that fell apart again just as soon as the sustenance was delivered. Ignoring her directive, Crookshanks pounced on her feet under the covers, biting her through the duvet without mercy. Erebus yowled again, winding his way up Snape’s side of the bed and meowing all the while. Finding it empty of his master, Erebus proceeded to climb Hermione, moving until he could sit on the middle of her chest where he loomed over her in all his large and fluffy glory, glaring down his nose at her like she was utterly useless in such a close imitation of Snape as her professor, that Hermione couldn’t help but laugh. The cat growled when she tried to reach for him, thinking to scratch his ears and Hermione giggled, shaking her head.

“Alright, alright, you pair of gits,” she sighed, shaking her head and shuffling her legs, trying to prevent Crookshanks from biting her anymore. “Get off me and I’ll feed you.”

Erebus continued glaring at her before moving to Snape’s pillow, eyeing her dangerously to ensure she kept her word and Crookshanks bounced off the bed toward the door, yowling loudly the entire way.

“The pair of you are spoiled brats,” Hermione told them as she rose to her feet and shoved her feet into the slippers she’d retrieved from her trunk after her first trip to the loo days ago when she’d come back to bed freezing and been snarled at by Snape when she put her cold soles against his bare shins to warm them up.

Ferreting one of Snape’s jumpers from a chair in the corner, she pulled a soft woollen one on and stretched languidly, wincing at the protests from abused muscles, but feeling a lot better today than she had yesterday.

“Alrighty, c’mon,” Hermione yawned, watching both cats bound down the stairs in front of her, the two of them tiffing and fighting as they went, clawing at each other and hissing as they raced into the kitchen where their food bowls waited – licked clean, naturally.

“Oh, gross,” Hermione sighed, noting that the cat flap had obviously been well used by the pair of them and a collection of half-eaten mice, voles, and a bird were strewn across the floor. “If you’re going to bring them in, at least eat them entirely, you wretched beasts.”

The cats ignored her grousing as she vanished the mess with her wand, the pair of them winding themselves about her ankles as she fetched the food from the cupboard where Snape had shoved Crooks’ food alongside Erebus’s. Once both monsters had been fed – diving face first into their meals as though there weren’t routinely fed three times a day, the greedy beasts – Hermione peered around the dingy kitchen, supposing some breakfast was in order. Vanishing the mess had already taxed her magic and she sighed, supposing it would be better for their combined health if she made something the muggle way.

Raiding the fridge, Hermione sighed again, frowning at the meagre contents before opening the pantry. It was similarly sparse of anything worthwhile to make a decent meal, and they’d finished all the bread for sandwiches. Her eyes danced over the kitchen before coming to rest on her trunk, and with a dawning sense of horror, Hermione realised she’d forgotten to unpack it.

“Oh, no!” she groaned, hurrying over and wrenching up the lid.

The smell hit her nose first, and Hermione winced. They’d forgotten to unshrink the fridge and plug it in to power somewhere.

“Bugger!” she grumbled, looking around and spying empty space through the kitchen in the small laundry where she expected a muggle dual-tub washing machine had once sat before Snape had bought the cottage, but been ripped out by the wizard calling this place home.

There was a plug she could use there, and so she fished out the appliance and carried it over to the space before enlarging it once more and plugging it in.

“Oh, gross,” she exhaled when doing so revealed that the contents hadn’t appreciated being shrunken and forgotten. Sour milk spilled out the bottom, among other things, and Hermione put her face in her hands, sighing in annoyance.

“What is _that_?” Snape rasped, disgust evident in his tone as he let himself in the laundry door from the backyard, sniffing loudly as he stomped the snow from his boots.

“We forgot about the fridge from my place,” Hermione said, her voice muffled by her hands.

“Delightful,” Snape grumbled sarcastically, and Hermione looked up when he started vanishing away the mess and tidying up without another word.

“Did your plants survive?” Hermione asked, moving up next to him and peering into the fridge, helping discern what – if anything – might’ve survived a few days without refrigeration.

“Not all of them,” he said tiredly, raiding the shelves and locating a number of jars of jams and relishes. “These might survive?”

“They’re old anyway,” Hermione said. “I need to learn to buy smaller jars when I just want to try a new one.”

“There _are_ nine flavours of marmalade here,” he agreed, sounding surprisingly tolerant, maybe even amused by her habit.

“And I only liked two of them,” Hermione said.

“I can see that,” he nodded, noting that the bush-lemon and bitter-orange marmalades had been all but emptied while the jars of lime, grapefruit, and tangelo had all been barely touched. “You have the same problem with jam.”

He fished out an additional eleven jars of jam.

“I prefer the jam,” she admitted. “Some of them, anyway.”

“Do want to keep them?” he asked, setting aside the tangelo one even though she’d only tried it once on toast and decided it wasn’t for her. Maybe he liked tangelo.

“Not unless you think you’ll eat them,” she confessed. “They’ve been taking up space in there for months. I think the lime marmalade has been there since I first moved into my flat.”

Snape shook his head, but Hermione would swear his lips were twitching with amusement and she wondered what had gotten into him that he seemed amicable, rather than grouchy, as he had done since her arrival.

“How many plants did you lose?” she asked conversationally, wondering how long this good mood might last.

“About a dozen,” he answered, ferreting some vegetables from the crisper that looked a little battered, but otherwise unharmed by their shrinkage, and stint of neglect.

“Anything terribly difficult to replace?” she asked.

“One or two were quite rare,” he shrugged, holding up the collection of wrapped cheeses in the fridge and raising an eyebrow at her.

“Harry,” she said by way of explanation. “Rather than wine, when he stops by to visit for dinner or brunch, he brings a cheese platter or one of those little hampers with cheese and crackers and tea and such. You know the ones? The kind you pick up to take to an aunt’s place for the weekend? From Tesco’s. I’ve no idea why he always brings them, but he does.”

“Raised by Petunia, wasn’t he?” Snape confirmed, frowning at the cheese thoughtfully.

“He was,” Hermione nodded. “Not very nicely, though.”

“Probably explains it,” Snape answered. “The way she was raised, those hampers sometimes were the only thing that got us through.”

“Us?” Hermione asked.

Snape raised an eyebrow at her again.

“Didn’t Potter show you my memories?” he frowned at her.

“I… he did,” she allowed honestly. “Why?”

“I knew his mother because we were raised around the corner from one another,” he said, waving a hand toward the backdoor as though it was nearby.

“Wait… you were raised here?” she frowned at him. “I thought your home was burned down after the war? Didn’t I read that the loyalists set it alright?”

“It was. They did,” he nodded. “This place is much further North than Cokeworth, where I was raised.”

“Oh,” Hermione said. “But you were raised close to Lily and Petunia?”

Snape nodded. “Just ‘round the corner from them. It…wasn’t a nice neighbourhood.”

“No?” she asked, wondering how much he might divulge, surprised at his conversational cooperation to have gotten this much out of him.

They’d barely spoken since she’d arrived and it was unusual to imagine her stoic and stern and utterly acerbic Potions Master from school deigning to converse with her like they were both mature adults, rather than that he thought her to be a raging imbecile.

“Wine was discouraged as a gift if calling on others,” he said quietly. “Wine won’t feed a family, but it’ll result either in another mouth to feed, or a raging row where someone walks away battered and broken.”

“Oh,” Hermione frowned. “ _That_ kind of neighbourhood.”

Snape nodded and Hermione recalled reading in a post-humous article about Snape that his mother had been a pureblood witch cast out of her family after getting pregnant by and subsequently marrying a muggle. She’d read that Snape had been poor, and ugly, and beaten. Madam Pomfrey had tearfully confessed at Snape’s memorial that while she was sad to lose him, after the lifetime of pain and horror he’d endured, he had more than earned a rest in peace.

“Much more acceptable, if bringing a gift at all, to bring a hamper that provided a little of everything anyone might need. Cheese. Biscuits. Tea. Chocolate. All the things none of us could afford for ourselves on a regular basis. Perhaps the practice stuck with Petunia and she passed it on to Potter.”

“I remember Harry telling me that his Aunt and Uncle were reasonably well off,” she frowned. “Very concerned with what the neighbours might think. Wouldn’t wine be the more acceptable gift in such middle-class occasions?”

“Some habits die hard, Miss Granger,” he said quietly. “Do you wish to keep the cheeses?”

“They’re probably bad after three days of neglect,” she sighed. “And to tell you the truth, Harry doesn’t have the best eye for choosing those hampers. Some are filled with goodies, and others look like the cast-offs no one wanted from the deli that get tossed in a hamper to be sold-on rather than binned.”

Snape chuckled.

“Not a blue-cheese fan, then?” he asked.

“I’m afraid not,” she shook her head. “I prefer brie, camembert and those cracked-pepper infused cheddars.”

Snape nodded, vanishing the cheeses with a wave of his wand and continuing to empty the fridge of other things past their expiry, or gone bad in their neglect.

“What about you?” she asked. “Do you have a favourite?”

“Cheese?” he asked.

Hermione shrugged. “Or marmalade or jam?”

Snape shrugged his shoulders, holding up a jar of pickles and raising an eyebrow at her to ask if she wanted to keep them. She shook her head.

“Blackberry jam is nice,” he admitted. “Feta cheese. Or those apricot cream-cheese things. Tangelo, or a tri-fruit marmalade.”

“Those apricot cheeses sneak up on you,” she nodded. “I hated them for years whenever Mum would buy those little wine-accompaniment packs, but I tried it recently at Harry’s place and loved it!”

“Maturity finally catching up with you?” he smirked, finally closing the fridge. “Wait until you realise mushrooms and truffles are also delicious, even though they tasted like old shoes when you were a child.”

“They still taste like old shoes,” she told him. “I still pick mushrooms out of carbonara before I’ll eat it whenever someone is foolish enough to add them.”

He shook his head while Hermione returned to her trunk and began digging out the items from her pantry that had been shrunken, putting them away in Snape’s pantry instead without a second thought.

“Well,” he said eventually after moving over to boil the kettle and fixing them both a cup of tea – something Hermione paused in her unpacking of tinned soup and dry pasta packets to watch him make because he seemed to have a special process that meant the tea he gave her was the nicest she’d had in her life.

“Well?” she asked, when she closed the pantry after the last can of spam was shelved.

“Doesn’t look like there’s much worth eating after all that,” he commented, leaning against the kitchen counter and sipping his tea thoughtfully, his eyes on the window to the backyard where the snow continued to fall.

“Not really,” she agreed, not really thinking about it before she carried the teacup he’d filled for her over to where he stood, leaning against the counter beside him, close enough that her hip rested against his and their elbows brushed.

He glanced sideways at her, meeting her eyes for a long moment, and Hermione noted that he didn’t bother commenting on the sense of energy and calmness that settled over her to be touching him again.

“Still sore?” he asked quietly.

“Mmmm,” Hermione nodded. “Not as much, but yes.”

“You probably will be for a long time,” he said. “The effects of the Cruciatus in volumes like that tend to endure for a long time. Sometimes months.”

“I know,” Hermione admitted quietly. “It took almost six months before the random tremors and spasms stopped after what Bellatrix did to me at Malfoy Manor.”

Snape nodded.

“Do you still endure the effects, too?” she asked.

“It’s been more than a year since I was tortured,” he said.

“That wasn’t an answer,” Hermione pointed out softly.

Snape’s eyes returned to the window.

“It wasn’t,” he agreed.

Hermione wondered if she should leave the topic alone. Recalling the agony and the feeling of terror and helplessness and anger she’d endured when she’d been tortured, she didn’t imagine he’d be any more interested in remembering or speaking on such topics than she was.

“The Dark Lord was even more ruthless than Bellatrix and Dolohov,” he said quietly after a long stretch of silence grew between them. “Much more vicious; much more controlled. Finesse, he’d have called it. Bella and Dolohov were both a little mad. They operated largely on anger and hate; both fine fuel for such a curse, but not as cruel as cold detachment and a true sadism to simply watch a victim writhe. The Dark Lord… well… when he deigned to torture a man, they usually lost their minds from the targeted and immense agony. He could focus it on a singular body part if it suited him, rather than the all-over torture.”

Hermione gulped audibly at the very idea.

“Did you… that is… how often did he…”

“Often,” Snape said quietly before sipping his tea. “I was an Order spy in his midst. There were times I was deliberately kept out of Order planning to have plausible deniability and thus keep the Dark Lord from learning our movements. Dumbledore imagined it would protect me. I couldn’t be punished for not being privy to something, he thought.”

“He was wrong?” Hermione guessed.

“I was punished for not being an effective enough spy to be trusted with such information if I had the deniability, and punished for the execution of those plans, even if I was able to provide forewarning to the Death Eaters.”

“That’s barbaric,” Hermione said, aghast at the depths of such cruelty.

“They were evil people, Miss Granger,” he reminded her. “Truly evil.”

“Do you still experience side effects?” she asked.

Snape looked at her sideways for a long moment before slowly peeling a hand from around his teacup and offering it to her, palm-up. Surprised, Hermione set down her own cup and placed her hand in his, having grown used to touching him in the three days they’d spent barely alive in bed, but prone to snuggling for the soothing effect it had on the bond between them. Snape seemed shocked that she would so readily do so, but he didn’t comment before twisting her hand down to rest it against the outer curve of his left thigh. He pressed her palm flat to the fabric of his trousers there and Hermione held her breath, unsure what he was doing.

After a moment, she felt it. The muscle in his thigh spasmed and twitched, tensing and cramping, ticking and jumping under her hand. He gave no outward indication that it hurt, though from the feel of the tightened, twitching flesh, it surely must ache, and Hermione held her hand there until after several long minutes, the muscle laid still once more.

“Doesn’t it hurt?” she asked, noting that he hadn’t even stopped drinking his tea.

“Of course,” he said, frowning at her as though the question was idiotic; as though, having experienced such side-effects herself which tended to leave her cursing and whimpering pathetically, she shouldn’t need to ask.

“You don’t show it,” she said, taking her hand away when he released the back of it.

“That particular spasm has been a constant companion since I was nineteen,” he shrugged his shoulders.

“And it still gives you grief?” she asked, horrified.

“The muscle died under the Dark Lord’s wand,” Snape told her quietly. “Complete cell death. It’d have hurt less to lop the wretched thing off with a chainsaw, I think. Poppy managed to revive it, but it’s never been the same. The cold weather makes it worse.”

“How did you manage the stairs at Hogwarts for all those years if it did that every winter?” she said, noting now that she was looking that the muscle was ticking again. She confirmed it when she touched him again, feeling it spasming all over again.

“With difficulty, some days,” Snape shrugged. “There was a reason I lived in the dungeons, beyond being closer to the Slytherin Common Room. Straining it makes it ache worse than the cold, even if it was dank and cold down there, too.”

“Do any of the others do that?” she asked, her thumb idly worked at the cramp sitting tight in his thigh without really thinking about it.

“Yes,” he said. “The Dark Lord always took pains to target my lower body, lest such spasms impede my ability to brew the potions he required of me.”

Hermione winced in sympathy. “I’m sorry you had to go through all that, sir,” she said quietly. “And that you still suffer for it.”

He finished his tea without saying anything and Hermione followed suit, sipping slowly and wondering how much he’d been through and what he’d survived that he could seem so calm about it. Even now, she could see and feel that muscle spasming, but he showed no outward signs of his suffering. She wondered suddenly if this was the reason he was always so unkind to everyone at school. Idiotic teenagers bent on causing disruptions in class and goofing off must’ve been terribly tiresome when faced with the doubtless agony of such a side-effect, bought with a curse to protect the self-same dunderheads from darkness for just a little while longer.

“I had looked forward to oblivion, Miss Granger,” he confessed quietly, addressing the elephant in the room after a long stretch of silence.

Hermione bit her lip, pulling her hand away from his leg and pushing away from the bench. She crossed to the window and peered out over his back garden, noting that it was large and extensive, filled with greenhouses and thick borders of plants useful in potion making and cooking, rather than any kind of aesthetic plants.

“I didn’t intend to rob you of it, Professor,” she said quietly without looking at him.

“And yet, you did,” he answered.

“It was instinct,” she shrugged. “I’d been practicing a litany of spells in my head and in wrist movement for months while we were on the run. I feared Harry or Ron would fall to the Death Eaters. I was willing to do whatever it took to keep them from departing this world too soon. After so much practice, I expect it was simply muscle memory taking over when you were suffering.”

“You confess, then, that you _did_ cause this bond between us?” he confirmed.

“I don’t see how there could be any other explanation, sir,” she admitted, turning back to look at him guiltily. “I had been practicing it, and you weren’t in any shape and wouldn’t have instigated such a tether, yourself, I don’t think?”

“Not likely,” he shook his head, his eyes narrowed as though he was still angry about it.

“And so unless we were linked before then – which would surely have come with side-effects we’d have noticed before now given the numerous times we were both endangered before and during the war, it stands to reason that I did tether our souls,” Hermione sighed. “I didn’t mean to... though after having you come to my rescue so recently, I can’t entirely say I regret it.”

He curled his lip at her and Hermione wondered if his anger with her from a year ago would resurface. She wondered how things were supposed to look between them for the rest of their lives – for the rest of eternity. She had, essentially, tied their souls together as one for the rest of time. As long as the world kept circling the sun and the planet was inhabitable, they would be tied together forevermore, destined to find one another again and again until the universe imploded and they were all nothing but atoms, once more.

Hermione eyed him, armed with that knowledge, wondering what on earth they were supposed to do and how things could ever return to some semblance of the normality they’d known before this. Was it possible? Did she even want that?

“Are you still tired?” he asked after what felt like a lifetime of staring each other down, daring the other to speak first; to say something – anything – to hint at where they were supposed to go from here.

“Yes,” Hermione admitted. “Though not as much as yesterday.”

He nodded.

“And you?” she asked.

His mouth twisted unpleasantly like he didn’t want to admit to anything.

“That vanishing was tiresome,” he confessed eventually.

Hermione nodded.

“There’s no food, either,” she pointed out. “At least, nothing appealing.”

He sighed.

“There’s a collection of take-away menus in that drawer behind you,” he said quietly.

Hermione raised her eyebrows, turning and digging inside it. He wasn’t wrong. Pizza. Pasta. Chinese. Thai. The pub down the way. They all had delivery options.

“None of them are open for breakfast,” Hermione pointed out, sighing as she looked over their opening hours. “What time is it, anyway?”

Snape glanced at a miniature grandfather clock mounted on the wall above the sink.

“Only half-ten,” he said. “Nothing will be open for hours for table service or delivery from the village.”

“Is there a grocery store nearby?” she suggested.

“We’re in no fit state to apparate,” he pointed out. “And I’ve never bothered with a car.”

“Neither have I,” she confessed.

Snape folded his arms over his chest, eyeing the pantry, and then the clock once more.

“There’s a muggle Tesco’s four blocks away,” he said.

“We could walk there,” Hermione said, smiling.

“Could we?” he frowned at her, looking like he didn’t think they actually could make it that far. “It’s mostly downhill into the village, but the walk back will probably kill us. Literally.”

“They probably have a taxi service,” Hermione pointed out. “Most muggle places do, these days and even if they don’t, we can always just call one.”

Snape raised his eyebrows, evidently unaware of that. She supposed that he’d always apparated and might not have bothered to learn that fact.

“Very well,” he sighed.

Hermione grinned. “I’ll make a list of what we need,” she said, ferreting around in her trunk for some parchment and a quill.

“I need to wash up if I’m to be seen in public, I suppose,” Snape confessed, running a hand through his lank hair and looking a little disgusted with himself for the state of it when his hand came away a little oily.

“That’s alright,” Hermione shrugged. “I’ll find something in my trunk to wear to the shops and change, and I’ll make a shopping list while you bathe. It might be worth stripping the bed, too… we’ve barely left it in three days.”

Snape’s brow furrowed for a moment – she supposed at the casual reference to their sharing a bed – before he nodded.

“I have fresh flannels in here if you don’t mind them?” she suggested, coming across the packed linens and fishing them out to show him.

“They’re pink,” he frowned at her.

“So what?” Hermione frowned right back. “They’re warmer than those threadbare things currently on that mattress.”

Snape narrowed his eyes at her before flicking his wand at the sheets she clutched and changing the threads to black.

“Really?” she asked dryly, shaking her head at him.

He sighed, snatching them from her and turning to stomp out of the room.

“Only way to avoid staining them,” he muttered on his way out of the room.

“Hang on,” she called after him, fishing out some clothes to wear to the shops and thinking she might have to make some time to go through the other belongings all crammed in the trunk shortly. “I’ll give you a hand.”

He was already in the bedroom and manually stripping the bed when she hurried up the stairs after him. Lightheaded and a little out of breath, Hermione leaned in the doorway for a moment.

“You said it’s all downhill to Tesco’s, right?” she confirmed.

He looked over his shoulder at her, looking wearier than he had downstairs too and Hermione realised that despite feeling better this morning, neither of them were anywhere near replete.

“I thought you said contact would help heal us both faster,” he grumbled. “The Cruciatus never took this much out of me in the past…”

“I think it’s because you’ve been unwell and recovering for so long,” Hermione told him. “I expect that taxed both of us a lot more then we realised, and to throw this incident on top… the human body can only take so much.”

“You said you had nowhere to be until the end of Christmas break?” he confirmed as Hermione moved into the room and began helping him make the bed with the new mattress protector and sheets. She’d found some blankets and brought those up too, rather thinking the duvet could use a wash too.

“I suppose I’ll be invited ‘round the Burrow for Christmas dinner, but other than that, I’ve nowhere to be.” Hermione shrugged. “You could come along, if you fancy it?”

“No,” he answered shortly.

“What?” she asked. “Why not? You can’t spend Christmas alone, sir. That’s not healthy. Come on, it’ll be great, and Molly always makes entirely too much food. There’ll be plenty to go around…”

“No one else knows I’m alive, Miss Granger,” he reminded her quietly when they managed to wrestle the sheets onto the bed and began spreading out the blankets she’d brought up when Snape took a look at the ones they’d been using and noted they had started to smell after such frequent use over the past few days.

“But…” Hermione stopped. “Literally no one?”

“Well, I expect Greyback won’t be forgetting in a hurry,” he offered dryly.

“But what about all the people who helped you recover?” she asked. “You needed more medical care than I gave you in that Shack.”

“Their memories have been modified,” he said.

“Whatever for?” Hermione frowned at him.

“I was a Death Eater, Miss Granger,” he reminded her. “I murdered Albus Dumbledore.”

“Rubbish,” Hermione said, folding her arms. “I’ve seen the memories, sir. I know you acted on Professor Dumbledore’s order. I know he begged you to put him out of his misery before his pain and his horrible condition could get any worse.”

“Nevertheless,” he said.

“Everyone else knows it, too. You might’ve still been recovering somewhere while it took place, but a post-humous trial was held for you, sir. You were cleared of all charges, and you’ve been awarded an Order of Merlin, First Class for your services and sacrifices protecting the wizarding world from darkness. I’m sure I have a copy of the trial notes somewhere, or the articles they’ve written praising you. I’ll get them…”

“Miss Granger,” he interrupted quietly.

Hermione stopped on her way to the door, looking back to find him sitting on the end of the freshly made bed.

“Sir?” she asked when she noted how he’d hung his head.

“No trial of the Wizengamot can clear my conscience,” he said quietly. “And if I’ve learned anything throughout the past three decades, it’s that there is nothing quite like an untimely death to allow the weeding out of personal flaws from a body’s memory. People will do a very great deal to avoid speaking ill of the dead, you know?”

“What are you saying?” she asked.

“In death, many among the Order may have found it within themselves to begrudgingly forgive my trespasses, Miss Granger. But to learn I still draw breath after all that has been done in honour of me? That will stir up a lot of hurt feelings and rip open old wounds I’d just as soon let scar once and for all.”

“You want to simply let sleeping dogs lie,” she said quietly. “But… why? Aren’t you lonely in this tired old house all by yourself, sir?”

She looked around the room quietly, noting the tiredness of the wallpaper, and the weariness of the cupboard doors sagging on their hinges and the thin old carpet, long since faded and worn, practically threadbare.

“I enjoy my solitude, Miss Granger,” he said quietly, lifting his head to meet her eyes. She wondered if the _I’d very much like to get back to it_ was meant to be quite so loud when left unsaid.

“Do you want me to go?” she asked quietly, frowning. “I’m strong enough. I can… I can think of something. Stay at the Burrow if I have to. Harry might let me crash with him until something can be found…”

“You said yourself that doing so would draw unnecessary attention to your random uprooting, and thus your attack and subsequent survival,” he pointed out, and Hermione couldn’t tell if he was trying to keep her there, or simply keep their secrets. Hers for the attack. His for the murders. Theirs for the soul bond.

“Yes, but I don’t want to put you out, sir,” she said. “After two decades teaching whiny and ungrateful children, and even longer at war with yourself and under the direction of two incredibly powerful and rather unforgiving wizards, I can understand that you might enjoy simply keeping your own schedule and not having to bother about anybody else. I have already inconvenienced you quite enough by forcing your survival when you did not wish it, and by binding our souls when neither of us intended it. I won’t rob you of whatever additional peace you might find, Severus.”

He blinked, though at the softly spoken words or her use of his first name, she didn’t entirely know. His dark eyes searched her face for a long time, and she suspected he took some measure of comfort from the sincerity of her statements.

“We’ve only just made the bed,” he pointed out, obviously not wanting to strip it and hunt down whatever he had on hand in the event that she should leave and take her belongings with her.

She wondered if it was an excuse.

She wondered if he was proving more forthcoming than she’d ever dared dream because no matter what he said about enjoying his solitude, maybe he was lonely and did take some measure of comfort from having her there. Maybe he didn’t want to be alone for the holidays, no matter what he said.

“We have,” she agreed. “And it _does_ help to be in close contact. I don’t want to be too weak to climb the stairs for months, you know?”

She rubbed her hands on her thighs, realising suddenly that she still wore only his borrowed nightshirt and his borrowed jumper and a pair of slippers, her legs bare.

“Alright then,” she said, glancing down at herself and trying not to blush when she realised that not only were her legs on display, they were also rather hairy after days of neglect. “Well, I’ll change, and we’ll head to the shops. Stock up for the rest of the holiday season. We’d better get some cat food, too. Those monsters dragged in five little beasties they’d slaughtered in evidence of our poor hunting skills.”

Snape watched her for a moment as she retrieved the clothes she’d brought up, awkwardly shuffling her feet and waiting for him to go so she could change.

“I’ll bathe,” he said, rising to his feet.

Hermione nodded, watching him collect some things from the cupboard before he headed for the door.

“Professor?” she called after him before he could close it behind him.

He stopped, his back still turned, evidently listening.

“You really would be very welcome at the Burrow for Christmas, you know?” she said softly. “I know Harry, in particular, would very much like to speak with you.”

Snape didn’t say anything before he quietly pulled the door closed behind him, letting it shut on the idea and the conversation with a soft click.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: *skips gleefully into the room*
> 
> *cackles triumphantly*
> 
> *does a happy little jig*
> 
> *stuffs the new chapter into your bucket of leftover Halloween candy*
> 
> *Exits, humming Christmas music and dancing like she's got a hula-hoop*
> 
> xx-Kitten.

Freshly showered, Severus used a drying charm on his hair, not interested in catching his death by walking in the snow with damp locks. He was weak enough after their tether and their battle with the Death Eaters that he imagined it would be quiet easy for them both to fall ill in weather like this, and if he had to go on living, he would bloody well do it without the flu, thank you very much.

Downstairs, he found Miss Granger in the kitchen making a shopping list just like she’d promised. He read it over her shoulder without announcing his presence in the room, noting her familiar, neat handwriting and the rational choices she’d made for things they would need. She jumped in surprise when, without thinking, he leaned over her shoulder and took the quill from her fingers, jotting down several additional items he’d noted they would also need, both for the kitchen, and the rest of the household, including shampoo, since he’d used the last of it just now while he’d bathed.

“I have most of those things,” she pointed out.

“Pardon?” he frowned, his mind on the shopping.

“I’ve got shampoo and soap and things in my trunk. If you’ve no objections, I’d like to unpack a few of them – those that can be employed while I’m here. They’re in the way all crammed in my trunk after your hurried packing.”

Severus frowned. He hadn’t thought of that.

“By all means,” he invited, making an extra effort to keep from snapping at her now that a headache was beginning to prickle behind his eyes. He wanted to go back to bed, but his stomach was rumbling for food.

“Excellent,” she said. “I’ll be quick, I promise.”

She fished out all manner of lotions and potions and bottles of things he was sure a body certainly didn’t need for basic hygiene, but he didn’t voice the disparaging comments raging through his aching head when she gathered them all into her arms and carried them up the stairs. He didn’t see the point in attacking her over a few lotions and it wouldn’t do to take his blackening mood out on her when there was food shopping to be done before they could return to bed and sleep off the wearying effects of general existence. That could wait until so gargantuan a task as collaborative grocery purchase wasn’t looming between him and an end to his hunger.

“If I’m staying for the holidays, we really ought to decorate and get into the spirit, too,” she said when she returned, out of breath and looking rather peaky from climbing the stairs in her weakened state, but smiling jus the same. “If we’ve the energy after shopping, maybe we can dig out your festive decorations and put them up?”

“I haven’t got any,” Severus informed her idly, lazily doodling in the margin of the shopping list without paying much mind to the quill.

“You don’t have any Christmas decorations?” she asked, sounding scandalised as though the notion of boycotting such a holiday was reprehensible.

“Do I strike you as a terribly festive person, Miss Granger?” he drawled, raising his eyebrows at her.

“This is… unacceptable,” she declared, shaking her head in horror while she looked at him like he’d grown an additional head to find Christmas a chore, rather than something to celebrate. “It’s fine. I happen to own plenty of Christmas decorations. I’ll put them up when we return from getting the shopping done.”

Severus shook his head but he couldn’t be bothered arguing with her about it. Seventeen years as a Hogwarts Professor and forced to endure the holiday spirit of Dumbledore, Flitwick, and Hagrid had taught him that some people simply would not be moved from their insistence that such a tradition was both important and happy. If Miss Granger could really be arsed attempting to make his tired dwelling look like two Yule celebrants were inhabiting it in good cheer, then more power to her. It didn’t matter to him one way or the other whether or not she put up a Christmas tree because he had no gifts to wrap and place under it. No one knew he was alive, and he hadn’t any friend who’d have cared to receive one from him were he still believed to be amongst the living, besides.

“Have you any muggle money?” he asked. “I don’t keep much on hand, and the hospital pays me in Galleons.”

“I have some,” Hermione nodded. “I do most of my shopping in muggle London for the sake of convenience and anonymity.”

“Good,” he said, fetching the large trench-coat he favoured for traversing the muggle world and the plain, dark green scarf his mother had knitted him nigh on thirty years ago.

Miss Granger copied him, digging a heavy winter coat, along with a matching purple scarf, hat, and gloves from her trunk before closing the lid lest the cats get into it while they were out. As he headed for the door, Severus noted Erebus and Crookshanks streaking through the back garden, Erebus on Crookshanks’s tail and giving chase while they yowled loudly, positively furious at their continued cohabitation. He understood the feeling. He’d gone out of his way to be as polite as possible to the girl over the past few days, too tired to muster up any real anger, and in truth, he’d appreciated her sincerity upstairs, believing that should he ask her to clear out, she would.

The truth was, he’d discovered during his shower while ruminating on her words, that he didn’t _hate_ having her there. All they’d really done was share the bed and scoff down a few sandwiches when hunger roused them, too exhausted for anything more strenuous, but she was warm when she cuddled into him while she slept, and her presence soothed him. He knew it was the bond between them at work, putting them both at ease after so long apart since the inception of the tether, and especially while he’d been recovering.

The unsociable side of him detested having company and loathed having her – having _anyone_ – in his space. But the previously neglected and forgotten part of him that relied on human camaraderie if not closeness or companionship had paid dearly since his supposed death. Severus had never before truly been alone. For as long as he had worked at Hogwarts – nearly since his graduation – he’d been surrounded by his colleagues and the students and the elves. Even at the summer holidays when he could return to the hovel he had inherited and never bothered to maintain throughout the year, Albus had often called on him unannounced, and Minerva would drop round occasionally for a game of chess or with another ill-advised attempt to remind him that he didn’t _have_ to be horrible to the new first years every year.

Since his supposed death during the war and while he’d been recovering alone once he had escaped the hospital and wiped the memories of his carers, Severus had learned true solitude. It was why he’d gotten Erebus. His own dark thoughts were unnerving, at best, and with little to occupy him but his books and his memories, he’d retreated to those darker crevasses often and learned they were difficult to navigate and frightening to enter when there was no one who needed him for anything and no one who even knew he was alive, let alone anyone who cared if he undid Granger’s work and that of the healers and finally put an end to his suffering.

He knew, in large part, that such dangerous thinking was what had driven him to confront Miss Granger last year. He could’ve gone on with his life letting her and the rest of the world think him dead. He could’ve stewed on his fury without enlightening her of his rage against her for what she’d done. He could’ve just given up. But instead, he’d gotten a cat – a creature to rely on him every day and to drag him from the bed – literally – when he didn’t want to bother. He’d developed the garden, too, because Pomona had always told him that gardening was the hobby of the hopeful. One could not plant seeds in the ground without hope of seeing them germinate and flourish until they bloomed heavy with flowers and fruits. She’d once told him gardening was a brilliant tool for overcoming depression because even when suicidal ideations did creep in, the reminder of waiting just one more day in the hopes of seeing a bud unfurl into a flower, or a flower blossom into a ripe fruit was enough and that every extra day brought a new incentive to stay.

Now he had a cat, and a garden and if he didn’t get up every day, both would fall into ill health. But he couldn’t deny the poignant resonance of Miss Granger’s question about loneliness. Yes, he was lonely. He’d been lonely most of his life, but it wasn’t until everyone believed he had departed from it that Severus realised how many people in his day to day existence actually impressed upon him some level of company, however brief.

He had considered notifying his former colleagues of his survival, but what would he say? What _could_ he say? When last he’d seen Minerva, she’d believed him a traitor who’d murdered their mentor. They had been at odds and he didn’t imagine she could so easily forgive him, even after his trail and Potter’s lack of discretion. The same went for Filius and Pomona and Hagrid. All had admired Albus, and all had reviled Severus when he’d been forced to betray them on Albus’s orders. His final moments with them – his final _year_ with them – had been unpleasant and fraught with unkindness and pain.

What would he say to any of them? _Sorry, I did what the headmaster ordered and didn’t trust you to know_?

And so, he’d said nothing, his letters topped with dates and addresses, and the Dear Minervas, Dear Filius’ and Dear Hagrids, but no text below, just empty ink blots and all the things left unsaid. He had discovered during that time, too, that he had no one else in his life. His parents were dead, he’d no siblings and all extended family on his mother’s side were dead or unknown to him. His father’s, all dead, too. Any friends he’d had over the years had been fleeting at best, or Death Eaters. He didn’t imagine Lucius would take kindly to a letter after all this time, and most of the others had been hunted down and given the Dementor’s Kiss. The Ministry wasn’t risking another embarrassing Azkaban break-out from this lot. They were kissed and left to rot somewhere if they were unlucky enough to be caught.

Who else could he contact? Potter? The brat he’d loathed all his life whose face reminded him so much of another man who’d made him miserable? The Weasleys, who thought him a traitor, and had never liked him, besides?

And then there was Miss Granger.

The annoying know-it-all who tried his patience in classes, defied his orders not to help Longbottom, and otherwise irritated him with her incessant need for validation through academia. The same girl who went out of her way to correct her classmates to use his proper title as a respected professor, even when she didn’t know he was in earshot. The girl who chided her friends on his behalf when they used unfortunate nicknames for him while he supposedly wasn’t around to punish them. The damned girl who’d saved his miserable life on the floor of that shack even when all he wanted was death and the peace it promised.

His _soulmate_.

He sneered at himself when he glanced down at the young woman walking at his side as he had the thought. It sounded fanciful and romantic, but magic so very rarely actually manifested in the way the muggles all went starry eyed over. This frizzy little witch had bound her life-force to his for the rest of time and she hadn’t even intended it. Wasn’t that just the icing on the cake? Not only was she the pain in the arse who’d annoyed him throughout six years of teaching, but she hadn’t even bound their lives together on purpose.

She’d tethered their souls for eternity _by accident_. What a fucking joke! Severus curled his lip as they strode through the snow side by side. He noted idly that while he’d been lost in his thoughts, she’d tucked one hand through the crook of his elbow where he walked with his hands tucked in his pockets to keep them warm. She was blissfully silent as they shuffled along, leaning on him occasionally when she nearly lost her balance on the few steep inclines between his home and the market; the icy paths nearly bringing her unstuck.

It was such a strange notion to Severus that of all the people in all the world that he could’ve been soul-bound to, it had to be this witch. He didn’t like her. He’d never liked her. She was pompous and self-righteous and obnoxious, most often bossy, swotty, and with a tendency to nag those around her to always be better and to behave. In short, she was a pain in the arse. And here he was, stuck with her for the rest of his natural life, and all his subsequent lives to come.

“Oh, shall we?” she interrupted his unkind thoughts and Severus glanced at her.

She pulled him to a stop on the side-walk just a block from Tesco’s, peering in the window of a small muggle café.

“Why?” he frowned at the busy little shop filled with hungry muggles chatting and laughing as they dined and drank tea together.

“Shopping on an empty stomach is never a good idea,” she answered. “And if we’re to put up decorations this afternoon when we return, we won’t have time for cooking something, too.”

“You imagine I will be putting up decorations?” he scoffed, darkly amused at the very idea.

“Well… if you _want_ to cook while I do that, I suppose we can save the money…” she frowned, but right at that moment a young couple excited the café discussing the deliciousness of their meal together and the strong scent of coffee, baked goods, and freshly cooked breakfast foods slammed into Severus’s nose, making his already rumbling stomach begin to cramp with hunger.

“Fine,” he sighed. “We’ll eat. But if you expect me to be polite, you’ve forgotten who you’re dealing with.”

Severus wondered what to make of it when the small witch at his side laughed out loud, the tinkling sound like bells over the freshly falling snow before she patted his arm reassuringly and tugged him toward the door.

“Table for two, please?” she asked when one of the serving girls hurried over to her as she entered.

“Right this way,” the cheerful muggle answered, barely a girl of fourteen, by the looks of her. Perhaps she had a holiday job. It didn’t matter. Severus sneered, curling his lip at the sight of anyone of an age that he had once taught.

He stopped listening while the girl rattled off the specials they were running that day before she asked what they wanted to drink.

“Hot chocolate, please?” he heard Granger ask before she looked expectantly at him and Severus glanced down at the menu.

“The same,” he grunted, perusing the meal options while the waitress hurried away to process their drink order.

“Ooh, they have waffles and ice-cream with hot chocolate fudge,” Granger pointed out excitedly. “Merlin, it smells good in here. I’m starving. Those sandwiches we’ve been living on haven’t filled me up at all.”

Severus let her prattle on while he read the menu, noticing idly that after a few minutes of being seated, she snuck her hand across the table and began toying with his fingers of the hand not occupied by holding the menu. Intrigued, Severus didn’t lower the menu, noticing that she played with them like they piano keys, pressing them to the table-top with her own, before lifting them and wiggling them, generally fidgeting. She paused when Severus turned his hand over, offering it to her palm up just the see what she would do. He was surprised when she slid her own palm over his, holding his hand briefly and emitting a quiet sigh before she went back to fidgeting.

Perhaps she was nervous? Severus didn’t know. It’d been a long time since he’d spent any real time in company and the past few days had mostly revolved around sleep, though he had noticed she had a tendency to play with his fingers and trace patterns on his arms when he thought she was asleep between bouts of napping while they recuperated.

“What are you going to have?” she asked when he lowered the menu.

“The full English breakfast,” he pointed, eyeing a few of the plates being carried out to people loaded with food. Eggs, bacon, sausage, black pudding, toast, roasted tomatoes, fried mushrooms and beans all made his stomach growl.

“Oh, that looks good,” Granger said, watching the various foods being carried to people’s table with hungry eyes.

“Do you have the shopping list?” he asked idly when she kept playing with his fingers while she looked around the shop with interest.

She dug it out of her pocket and handed it over, making him smirk just a little bit when she produced a muggle pen from somewhere as well, offering it to him. Severus read over it again, noting down a few more things they might need as he looked around the store, thinking of more delicious things he’d like to eat if they were going to splurge.

When the waitress returned with their hot chocolates they each gave their meal orders and Severus noted that Granger chatted briefly with the girl about the weather and the busy shop and the meal choices, adding a side of bacon and syrup to her waffles and requesting a pot of tea for them to share. She was a chatty little thing, he thought. Cheerful, her dark eyes sparkling with happiness as she hummed along to the Christmas music playing over the radio and she eyed the decorations adorning the shop with interest.

“This is your favourite time of the year, isn’t it?” he guessed, shaking his head the longer he observed her.

She turned her eyes to him, still smiling.

“I love the colours,” she confessed. “And the lights. And I love the snow. I even enjoy the music. Seeing it really makes me miss Hogwarts and the twelve trees Hagrid would haul into the Great Hall every year.”

Severus shook his head, though he had to admit that Christmases spent at Hogwarts had always outshone any he’d spent with his family or on his own.

“The figgy pudding _was_ rather good,” he conceded.

“All of it was good,” she said. “It wasn’t quite the same when I went back last year, but it was still nice at Christmastime.”

“You returned?” he frowned at her.

“Hmmm?” she hummed, watching another waitress go by balancing several plates of food that smelled divine. “Oh, yes. I went back and completed my N.E.W.T.s. I didn’t want to go into Auror Training with Harry and Ron. The time I spent on the run from Death Eaters was more than enough dark-wizard interaction for me, thank you.”

Severus raised his eyebrows and simply waited for her to recall that _he_ was a dark wizard. When, eventually, her eyes moved to his face he watched her cheeks turn pink.

“I don’t imagine that’s worked out so well for you,” he drawled, smirking a little at her embarrassment.

“ _Formerly_ dark and _still_ dark are different things,” she replied quietly.

“Did our recent interactions with my former brethren suggest those days are behind me?” he scoffed, amused that she thought the double homicide he’d committed didn’t qualify him as evil.

“Self-defence,” she shrugged.

“My life was never in any danger,” he argued.

“Mine was,” she answered softly, holding his gaze. “And if there’s anything I’ve learned about you since beginning at Hogwarts, it’s that you will always act to protect people from any real harm whenever you are able.”

Severus raised his eyebrows at the folly of the very idea.

“I think you might’ve fallen into the trap of not speaking ill of the dead and thus, misremembering me, Miss Granger,” he said dryly.

She regarded him steadily, not looking the slightest bit afraid of him, even after all he’d done and all she knew of him and Severus wondered at her capacity for forgiveness and her overall intelligence.

“You have always acted to prevent bodily harm wherever possible, Severus,” she told her quietly. “Emotional scarring is, of course, another matter entirely, but no one is perfect.”

He snorted in spite of himself, shaking his head at her.

“I suspect this bond between us might be addling your perception of me, Miss Granger.”

“Highly unlikely,” she sniffed, before they were interrupted when their food arrived.

Too hungry to bother continuing with the conversation, Severus dug into his breakfast greedily and noted that Granger was doing the same. They fell silent after that, passing the salt and pepper, pouring tea when the hot chocolate ran out, and otherwise devouring their food with relish. Severus realised only when he’d polished off the entire meal and had to resist the urge to lick his plate clean that he really had been starving.

“Mmmm,” Granger hummed, mopping up the last of her melted ice-cream with the final bite of her waffle and chewing it delightedly. “That was fantastic.”

“Agreed,” he conceded. “Good idea.”

She smiled, obviously pleased at the praise and Severus wondered if she still craved his approval after all the time.

“It’s really coming down out there,” she noted, eyeing the heavily falling snow beyond the warmth of the coffee shop.

Severus glanced outside.

“We’d better get a move on,” he said. “My greenhouses will need more attention if this persists.”

Nodding, Hermione got up and went to the counter to pay for their food without consulting him and Severus shook his head at the witch when she returned, having been given a take-away menu and a small Christmas ornament in the shape of a seasonally decorated tea-cup topped with cream and marshmallows, bearing the holiday sentiments and the name of the café.

“Really?” he asked, shaking his head.

“It’s cute!” she said. “What a fun gimmick for the season. And they deliver, look!”

She waved the menu before tucking both into her purse and Severus suspected she must be one of those people who accumulated junk just because it was pretty or free. If she thought she was going to do so while staying with him, she was sorely mistaken.

“You are evidently their target market,” he told her.

“You think you’re not?” she frowned, putting her scarf, hat, gloves and coat back on to brave the cold.

“I’d have pitched them in the trash,” he said. “I have no need for junk.”

“You’re a bit of a grinch, aren’t you, Professor?” she laughed, shaking her head almost fondly as they spilled into the street.

Severus didn’t bother denying it. Instead, he lengthened his stride, sticking to the sidewalks with their overhanging shop fronts to keep out of the snow as much as possible and hurrying off to the grocery store. Granger stayed at his side, seemingly unaffected by his grim demeanour. He wondered where she got the nerve.

“Oh, no,” she groaned as they made it to Tesco’s and collected a trolley for the rather large amount of supplies on their list.

“What now?” he asked irritably, the cold and the headache still niggling behind his eyes putting him out of sorts despite the nice meal.

“Spasm,” she winced, leaning on the trolley and reaching for the middle of her back where she’d repeatedly endured a muscle spasm over the past several days following her torture.

Severus didn’t even think about it before reaching for the offending spot and digging his thumb into the muscle through her clothes, muttering a healing charm.

“Not in front of the muggles,” Granger hissed quickly though she slowly relaxed, breathing out carefully and forcing herself to straighten.

Severus glanced around, but no one was paying them any mind. So close to Christmas, the store was packed with people doing their last-minute shopping and unless someone was in their way, they weren’t focused on their fellow shoppers.

“Come on,” he said, fishing the shopping list from his pocket and consulting it before wheeling the trolley in the direction of the produce section.

Shopping for food with her, Severus was surprised to learn, was strangely soothing. She didn’t fuss or um and ah over whether to buy something or not. She picked things up, examined them, and either put them straight in the trolley, or put them back with a shake of her head. Despite having made a list, she wasn’t very good at sticking to it, he noticed, pushing the trolley along and watching her more than he was examining the stock on the shelves. She was a strange witch, he’d decided when he watched her put an enormous tin of shortbread biscuits in the trolley before picking up a box of chocolates, examining them, and putting them back on the shelf.

Severus learned quickly that she was an impulsive shopper, too. Something that became evident when they walked past a silly display of Christmas jumpers at the end of an aisle and she picked up the gaudiest one, laughing as she held it in front of herself before putting it in the trolley. He narrowed his eyes when she picked up a second one, eyeing him for a long moment and smirking.

“Don’t even think about it,” he warned her before she crossed the distance between them and held up the dark green knitted monstrosity with a Christmas tree on the front, measuring it against his chest whilst grinning.

“Perfect fit,” she smiled when Severus didn’t immediately push her away, not wanting to cause a scene.

“I won’t wear it,” he warned her.

She laughed again and dumped it in the trolley, ignoring his assertion.

“Hey, look! Baubles!” She exclaimed excitedly, finding the aisle with all the decorations and Severus shook his head. He thought about scolding her. He thought about putting the jumpers back on the shelf when she wasn’t looking. He even thought about ditching her to continue on with the rest of the shopping. His head was aching terribly and the longer they took, the weaker they got. He wanted to get home and fall back into bed, if he was being honest.

But Severus couldn’t deny that her obvious enjoyment with the holiday and the simple task of doing the shopping, even despite his bad mood, was contagious.

“I never imagined the swotty bookworm waving her hand incessantly in my classes would gush over tinsel, Miss Granger,” he shook his head at her when she piled numerous decorative items into the trolley, her smile growing with every added item.

“Surprise,” she grinned, bouncing her eyebrows at him. “We have to do _something_ to brighten your dreary house, after all.”

“Didn’t you say you had plenty of decorations in your things?” he asked mildly while she picked up a few rolls of wrapping paper and some string and gaudy stick-on bows.

“Yeah, but I mean… look at this stuff!” she declared, holding up a large wreath and smiling excitedly.

“I’m not hanging that on my door,” he warned.

“Psssh,” she scoffed, adding it to the trolley.

Severus sighed, beginning to think she was going to make a nuisance of herself even if he tried to forbid her from decorating his home.

“All of this muggle junk is superfluous compared to wizarding customary decorations for the Yuletide season,” he pointed out.

She paused in her toss-up between a gold and a silver glittery reindeer carving made of something spongy, her eyes lifting to his face.

“Like what?” she asked.

Severus raised his eyebrows before realising she was serious. Shaking his head, he pointed to the deer she clutched. “Put those back. I’m not having anything deer-shaped in my house. We’ll find some wizarding decorations.”

“Not here?” she said, looking around the store before spying a string of fairy lights and skipping over to pick them up.

Resigning himself to letting her decorate and supposing he might as well do things properly – the wizarding way – he removed the wreath she’d added to the trolley.

“Hey!” she complained.

“You’re a witch, Miss Granger,” he reminded her. “Make your own wreath out of materials that would do the pagan ancestors of your magical bloodline proud.”

Her eyes widened and she darted a look around before raising her eyebrows at him.

“Will you help me?” she asked.

Severus narrowed his eyes on her.

“If we can get out of here sooner rather than later,” he bargained.

“Done,” she said, setting down the lights she carried and leaving the section immediately.

After that, she followed the shopping list, collecting all manner of things quickly and efficiently, and only adding one or two other impulsive purchases to the trolley along the way.

At the checkout, he handed her a wad of muggle money to add to her own, packing the trolley with the bags once more.

“Go flag that cab out the front, could you?” she asked, nudging him while the last few items were rung up.

Severus looked around and spotted the cab, before nodding and wheeling the trolley that way. It didn’t take long for her to join him, carrying the last bag and tucking the change into her pocket before she helped him load their shopping into the cab. They rode in silence and Severus glanced sideways at her when she sighed and leaned over, resting her head on his shoulder and looking sleepy again.

“Almost home,” he murmured without thinking.

“Mmmmm,” she hummed. “Decorating might have to wait until after a nap…”

Severus chuckled softly.

“You wasted all your energy on excitement over cheap muggle trinkets,” he taunted softly, laughing a little more when she reached over and pinched him without a care that it might annoy him.

They paid the cab driver and attempted to juggle their purchases into the house while the snow continued to fall – a task made harder by the pair of felines winding around their ankles as they attempted to enter the house.

“I have to tend to my plants,” he told her, eyeing the falling snow with a little annoyance now, the thick blanket coming down hard.

“Go,” she nodded. “I’ll unpack the shopping.”

Severus left her to it, hurrying out the back door into the cold and crossing to the greenhouses, already pulling out his wand to cast warming charms and protective wards over the structures, hoping to ensure that as many of his precious plants as possible would survive the weather. Any number of them were vital for fresh stock of ingredients for his potion brewing on behalf of the hospital, and he couldn’t afford to lose them. Many of them would cost a small fortune to replace and while he hadn’t exactly had a whole lot of things on which to spend what money he’d earned since his faked death, he didn’t want to risk losing so many valuable items just because of a bit of snow.

The magic taxed him heavily, Severus learned, and he sighed wearily, his headache increasing tenfold the weaker he got. Wasn’t having Miss Granger around supposed to alleviate this weakness? Wasn’t letting her burrow into his side - into his bed - and letting her press her icy feet to his shins without killing her supposed to fast-track them both back to full health? Wasn’t he supposed to be able to get rid of her out of his house and out of his life again, sooner rather than later?

Growling insults about the witch, their bond, the idiocy of her instating it, and her obvious foolishness that she’d let a bunch of Death Eaters track her down _and_ penetrate her wards to torture her and get them both into this mess to begin with, Severus finished up protecting his plants as best he could. When he returned to the house, resigned to continued effort being expended to unpack the rest of the groceries, he found that she’d taken care of it and had even fixed them both a cup of tea. It wouldn’t be as good as what he could make – she didn’t have the patience to allow the tea to steep untouched, her impatience causing her to stir up the leaves and release tannins that made it too bitter – but it would have to do for the time being.

He frowned when he looked around, not finding her, before he heard her cursing colourfully from the stairs. Collecting his tea, he went in search of the slight woman and his eyebrows rose when he found her struggling down the stairs with the bedding they’d stripped earlier.

“What are you doing?” he asked, and when she gave him a look like he was a complete moron Severus had to resist the urge to snap at her.

“Putting these in the wash,” she answered. “They stink.”

Severus noted when she made her way past him that she was right; they were rather pungent.

“There’s washing powder in the cupboard above the sink,” he told her, following her into the laundry where she dumped the sheets and blankets into the large machine he’d purchased when he’d moved in.

“Did many more of your plants suffer?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” Severus told her. “The charms to protect them took a lot out of me, though.”

She nodded. “I know. I can feel it, too.”

Severus sighed irritably, leaning against the counter while she dumped some washing powder and fabric softener in with the linens.

“There’s no other way to speed up this process to regain strength?” he ventured, frowning, not having bothered to research the matter all that thoroughly beyond his initial attempts to figure out how – if at all possible – to be rid of the tether between them when he’d first figured out what she’d done.

“None worth considering,” she muttered, making the machine run and crossing the kitchen to collect her own cup of tea.

“Meaning?” he narrowed his eyes, watching the witch when she stared out the window and wouldn’t meet his gaze.

She ignored him.

Severus scowled.

“Miss Granger?” he demanded. “If you know of any additional means by which this wretched bond between us might allow us both to recover strength in a timelier fashion…”

“There are none worth considering,” she cut him off curtly, and Severus wondered how much of the life he might choke out of her without actually murdering her.

“But there _are_ other ways?” he pressed.

“I’m not telling you what they are, sir,” she said. “This situation is awkward enough, I should think.”

Severus reached for patience – no easy feat with his head pounding like a drunk elephant was using it for a tap-dancing stage.

“You are already living in my home, sharing my bed and routinely _cuddling_ me, Miss Granger,” he growled. “How much more awkward do you imagine things could really be?”

The insolent look she levelled at him sparked every professorly instinct he had, having always despised secretive, conniving, smug children.

“Speak!” he hissed, advancing on her when she refused to open her mouth.

It occurred to him in the recesses at the back of his aching mind that she had well and truly left her adolescence behind when she didn’t, for even a moment, back down. She didn’t cower. She didn’t tremble. She didn’t stammer or wring her hands together or shuffle her feet. She didn’t even break eye contact.

Were she still in the mindset of a child believing him to have authority over her, Severus knew she would have done so, but this brilliant, foolish, wretched young woman did none of those things. She held his gaze and met him head on, never budging from where she stood, refusing to give in to his scare tactics. He might’ve admired her for it had his temper not snapped at that particular moment.

Fine. If she wouldn’t speak, there were other ways he could extract the information from her. It was her own fault for holding his gaze so defiantly.

Severus invaded her mind with disgusting ease. Dimly he was aware of the way she _tried_ to occlude her mind; trying to empty it; trying to redirect him when that failed. He was even aware that she emitted a strangled sound of fury. But he was undeterred. A few teasing plucks at thoughts and memories brought him the information he needed, and Severus viewed the memory with frightening clarity when finally, the girl surrendered it. He read the words about the supposed benefits of a bond like theirs and a means for recuperating much more quickly followed mutual drain to such an extent as they had endured.

And when he withdrew from her mind after devouring the passage from within the memory, Severus took three large steps back from the witch and cleared his throat.

“None worth considering,” he repeated her words stiffly, refusing to meet her eyes for another moment.

She cleared her throat too, and Severus feared she might say something. He didn’t want to hear it. Setting down his teacup with more force than was strictly necessary, Severus turned and practically fled her presence, intent on returning to bed and sleeping to regain his strength.

The alternative was inconceivable.

No. The girl was right. It wasn’t even worth considering. Under no circumstance would Severus Snape debase himself so much as to shag Hermione Granger; especially not just to regain decent health.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: *snickers from the shadows*
> 
> *scampers under your bed while you're sleeping*
> 
> *drags nails across the floorboard to frighten you*
> 
> *sticks the chapter under the blankets by your feet while you panic*
> 
> *scurries away into the darkness*
> 
> xx-Kitten.

Hermione waited in the living room for more than an hour. She was tired and she desperately wanted to return to bed, but she didn’t dare when Snape might still be awake. She wasn’t sure she could face him after the way he’d invaded her mind. She wasn’t sure she would feel comfortable crawling into bed beside him now that they both knew an even better way to try and regain their strength and their good health could be achieved if they were willing to bump uglies.

She’d been horrified when she’d read about that. The bond wasn’t supposed to be used in this manner, she knew. Not really. It had been a spell invented to prevent one’s eternal love from passing into oblivion alone. A spell designed for people who loved each other so deeply that they wished to be together forever more, in this life and the next.

It wasn’t supposed to be a spell employed as a means of saving someone’s life. She’d known that when she came across it. She’d known it was supposed to be for lovers; partners; soulmates in heart already, intended to be bonded at the soul, as well.

It hadn’t been intended for a foolish girl who’d trained herself to use it so that if the time ever came that the prophesized saviour of their generation faced death, she might lend him her strength and pull him back from the brink. It certainly hadn’t been intended for one idiotic teenage girl to employ it on auto-pilot to saved her third least favourite teacher from the cusp of a death he had so desperately craved.

It wasn’t meant for _this_.

It was meant to be about love and happiness and eternity, and the need to replenish themselves and each other for the sake of their health – when employed as _intended_ – was something that most loving couples typically would already be engaging in by the time such an enchantment was enacted.

But not this.

Not Hermione Granger shagging her Potions professor. Not Severus Snape shagging a girl he undoubtedly still despised just because she’d been foolish enough to tether their souls, and then moronic enough not to be on her guard to such negligence as to allow Death Eaters to torture her to the very edge of her sanity, if not her life.

As they’d agreed, it was not worth considering.

But now he knew what she knew. Now he knew that he might be back to his spritely, bitter, jaded, and wholly unpleasant self if he just set aside his disgust and shagged her. Now they would both be uncomfortably aware of that solution the next time they each grew tired climbing the stairs. Now she’d have to figure out a way to look him in the eye without contemplating stripping him naked and ravishing him so that she might feel better and get on with her life as fate had intended before she’d gone and hitched her wagon to his.

Sighing, Hermione scrubbed her hands over her face, trying to think of something to say and some way to undo what she’d said and make him un-see what he’d seen. There wasn’t one. Not really. And it wasn’t like the option was in any way viable. She might be sharing his house and sleeping in his bed as a result of being completely depleted and almost dying a few days ago, but this arrangement was by no means sustainable. After all, not a single soul outside of herself – and she supposed Greyback, now – knew that Severus Snape was alive. No one knew he’d survived the Final Battle. No one knew that this entire time – for more than a year – he’d been hiding out in his own house and going about his life as though he hadn’t been killed.

What kind of an existence must that be?

Hermione couldn’t fathom it. There were too many people in her own life whom she would miss – whom she would rather actually be dead than go without talking to or seeing on a regular basis. Hermione couldn’t understand the idea of what it would be like to sever all acquaintance and never speak to friends, loved ones, or even colleagues ever again.

Wouldn’t he be terribly lonely?

Hermione signed, putting her head in her hands and closing her eyes. She was so tired. So ready to return to bed and sleep. Maybe she could sleep on the lounge. Surely Snape wouldn’t mind terribly much considering that he wasn’t overly fond of having her in his house or in his bed to begin with _and_ things were currently awkward between them. It wasn’t like she could struggle her way up the stairs despite her weariness just to climb into bed beside a man who had, until recently, been her school-teacher. It wasn’t like either of them could even fathom the notion of sharing their bodies for the sake of recuperating their strength.

For a moment, Hermione tried to picture it. She’d grown quite comfortable touching Snape in the days since her arrival, and if she was being honest, he had on more than one occasion repeated the act of using her breasts as a pillow, as he’d done when they first woke up together on her couch several days ago. But the idea of kissing him… or touching his bare chest, or imagining him hovered over her, intending to impale her, to breach her body with his own and… well, she didn’t imagine men like Severus Snape _made love_ , but she supposed he must know how to practice coitus. At least she hoped he did. She didn’t want to think of the man as a virgin. That would only complicate matters all the more.

“Miss Granger?” his low voice rasped from the doorway and Hermione’s head snapped up as she twisted in his direction, her cheeks flooding crimson at the notion of being caught thinking about Snape and sex in the same sentence.

“Sir?” she asked, her heart hammering uncomfortably in her chest to think that this man was a practiced Leglimencer and might very well be able to hear every thought crossing her idiotic mind, even now.

“Do you plan to remain down here all day?” he asked quietly, his eyes wary as he met her gaze.

“I… I didn’t think that you… um…. I thought it might be…”

“Awkward, yes,” he nodded. “But as we’ve ruled out the coital pathway as a means of regaining our combined strength in rapid-time, it seems rather foolish to also deny the other pathways of increasing vitality through touch, does it not?”

“I…” Hermione bit her lip, her eyes widening at his choice of words.

“Unless you are sitting down here agonizing over whether the notion _is_ actually worth considering?” he raised that damnable eyebrow at her sardonically.

Flustered, Hermione’s mouth gaped open and closed like a fish tossed on the sand. Snape’s expression never changed while her previous thoughts of what it would be like to shag him flooded her mind and Hermione couldn’t look away from him, terrified though she was that he might dive right back into her brain and see everything she was picturing and imagining.

“I’m _not_ a virgin, just so you know,” he said, turning away and moving back toward the stairs.

“Oh, Merlin,” Hermione whispered, horrified, realising he’d seen or heard everything she was thinking.

“Get off the couch and come to bed, Granger,” he said without looking back at her. “If I have to waste more energy coming down to get you a third time, the prickly personality you associate with myself from my days as your professor will pale in comparison to my irritation.”

Still mortified, Hermione rose quickly from the couch, following him to the stairs and beginning to climb though she was bone-weary and utterly exhausted and ever step felt like she was climbing Everest, rather than a thirteen-step staircase. By the time she reached the bedroom, Snape was already under the covers once more, his eyes closed though she could tell he was not yet asleep.

“Don’t sleep in those,” he warned when Hermione glanced down at her clothes from their outing and began thinking it would be too much effort to change into anything else when all she wanted was rest.

Sighing heavily, she began peeling them off one by one, before casting around for something comfortable to sleep in – her own pyjamas having been tossed in the wash with the sheets. She spied one of his night-shirts across the room and fetched it, pulling it on over her head before returning to the bed and peeling back the covers. When she climbed in, still embarrassed that she’d been caught thinking about his sex life, Hermione faced away from him, pulling the covers to her chin and stubbornly closing her eyes, trying to feel anything other than embarrassed.

She squeaked in surprise when he rolled toward her, slinging one long arm over her waist and dragging her across the mattress to the middle. He tucked his knees into the backs of hers, tangling their feet together and spooning himself around her entirely, his warmth engulfing her immediately. It wasn’t the first time he’d done so. That very morning she’d woken in a similar position, in fact, but that was before he knew that if they had sex, they might heal faster. That was before he’d told her he wasn’t a virgin.

“Miss Granger,” he muttered into her curls, his nose buried against the back of her neck as he snuggled into her entirely, surprising her with his habit of being strangely comfortable touching her, despite everything.

“Yes, sir?” she asked frowning and squirming a little bit to relieve a kink in her neck, tucking the pillow a little more firmly beneath her cheek.

“Shut off that whirring mind of yours and sleep, witch,” he commanded quietly, though his voice was already growing gravelly with sleep. “You’ll need your energy to decorate for Christmas when we wake…”

Hermione bit her lip.

“You promised you’d help,” she reminded him.

“If we’re to do it properly, a trip to Diagon Alley will be in order,” he muttered.

“Really?” she asked, attempting to twist and look at him, before finding herself held firm and earning a low growl of protest at her continued wriggling.

“Be still, girl,” he grumbled. “Yes, really.”

“Do you often go to Diagon Alley?” she asked. “How have you maintained the secrecy of your survival if you’re gallivanting about the Alley on a regular basis.”

“I am a Potions Master, Miss Granger,” he reminded her, shaking his head, his tone positively dripping with scorn. Hermione had never met anyone so prone to sounding like they thought her fifteen kinds of moronic.

“Polyjuice?” she guessed.

“Mmmm,” he hummed.

“Where do you get the hairs?” she asked.

“Muggles,” he shrugged. “They are alarmingly unobservant.”

Hermione couldn’t help the small giggle that escaped her at his baffled and yet judgemental tone about the apparent lacking intelligence of the muggles he must be accosting for the DNA on a regular basis.

“And who might you impersonate to attend the alley to shop for holiday items with me?” she wanted to know, desperate to talk about anything other than the elephant in the room.

“The waitress, today,” he replied.

“You stole her hair?” Hermione asked, horrified.

“I plucked it off her apron while she was clearing our plates,” he answered. “It’s not like I scalped the chit.”

“Even so,” Hermione protested. “You really mean to wear the face of a fifteen-year-old muggle girl just to come shopping with me?”

“Rather more appropriate than the face of an almost-forty-year-old Death Eater who is supposed to be dead,” he reminded her.

“You’re almost forty?” she frowned.

“Yes,” he sniffed. “And any commentary on that number would be ill-advised, Miss Granger.”

“Oh,” she frowned. “I… well, I don’t know why I’m surprised, since you went to school with Remus and Sirius and Harry’s parents. I suppose I imagined you’d be older than that, sir.”

“Miss Granger,” he warned.

“Not that you look old, sir,” she babbled nervously. “Just that because you taught us and you’ve always seemed so controlled and put together and mature, I suppose that I built up your age in my mind and it’s a shock to learn you’re so young.”

“Are you attempting flattery?” he inquired, sounding suspicious and maybe a little bit amused, though she could not see his face to figure out if he was teasing or if he was furious with her.

“No,” Hermione shook her head.

“Trying to rationalise to yourself that you’re not in bed with someone twenty years older than you, and that as you _are_ , it’s really just a number and not a big deal?” he guessed, and she suspected he was definitely amused now.

“I…”

“Or have your thoughts returned to notions of my virginity and considerations about the additional means by which we might make use of this tether and replenish our strength and thus, you’re calculating my youth comparative to my… abilities?”

Damn him for that silver tongue positively dripping with scorn and wicked amusement and maybe a little seduction.

No! There was no seduction. She was being foolish. He had said it was out of the question; not worth considering. He’d even put several meters distance between them downstairs at the very notion.

“You are impossible,” Hermione huffed, her cheeks crimson. The urge to stamp her foot, cross her arms and stomp out of the room was overwhelming, but she could hardly do any of those things when he was wrapped around her like a boa constrictor and not looking like letting her go any time soon.

His low laugh tickled the back of her neck and Hermione huffed again, annoyed, drawing more laughter from him. Squeezing her eyes closed, determined to end the conversation by falling asleep, Hermione startled when she felt him roll a little more toward her before he nuzzled her cheek.

Her eyes snapped open, darting toward him and narrowing suspiciously when he peered at her for a moment, his face all but alien when se realised he was grinning like a Cheshire cat.

“What?” she asked, aware that she sounded hostile, but wholly annoyed with him for teasing her and wanting very much to escape his presence so that she could be mortified in peace.

“You were, weren’t you?” he smirked.

Hermione scowled at him.

“I was what?” she demanded.

“Trying to figure out my age comparative to my abilities should such an inconsiderable notion actually be considered,” he pushed.

“You’re being ridiculous,” she informed him, forgetting for a moment just who she was insulting.

His eyes narrowed a little and Hermione worked very hard to ensure her mind was blank of all thoughts, expecting he must be trying to pick up on them again. For several long moments, their eyes remained locked, Hermione stubbornly occluding him and Snape stubbornly trying to figure out what was running through her mind and colouring her cheeks.

“Indeed,” he said eventually, surprising her, before he laid his head back on the pillow behind her, his arm tightening around her middle as he burrowed his nose back into her hair.

Hermione wanted to ask him what the hell _that_ was supposed to mean but it seemed wiser to simply let it go and let the conversation be forgotten. Closing her eyes, Hermione tried to will herself to sleep despite the troublesome wizard holding her and the incessant thoughts plaguing her mind surrounding their bond, their depletion, and the notion that even if they didn’t shag to replenish their strength this time, they were soulmates.

Resolved to do some further research about their tethered souls when she awoke to figure out how this was supposed to work when they weren’t romantically involved and might fancy other people, Hermione drifted off to a land of dreams where his _abilities_ were well and truly put to the test.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: *scampers in, wild-eyed*
> 
> *bounces gleefully*
> 
> *does a happy dance, handing over the chapter*
> 
> *wiggles eyebrows*
> 
> *cackles as she runs away*
> 
> xx-Kitten.

"This is disconcerting," Hermione muttered to Snape where he walked at her side though he was currently wearing the visage of the waitress from the coffee shop two days prior. Their shopping trip had taken a lot more out of them than expected and while Hermione had managed to lure him out of bed and down to help her with putting up a few decorations from among her stores the day before, they hadn't managed to make it to Diagon Alley for the traditional pagan trimmings of the holiday season until now.

"You're being ridiculous," Snape snapped at her, obviously uncomfortable in the skin of a teenage girl. He'd been forced to borrow some of Hermione's clothes to look the part when he drank the Polyjuice Potion and realized he was unprepared for the size difference between himself as a grown man, and the tininess of a teenage girl. He'd also demanded that Hermione not only provide clothing but help to dress him in that form while he was covering his eyes.

She suspected he'd never before pinched the hairs from anyone not also a grown man, and it hadn't occurred to him until too late that if he wanted to look the part, he'd have to strip naked and re-dress as a female. Not something any grown man should be excited about while wearing the skin of a teenage girl. She didn't think either of them would ever be able to look at the poor muggle waitress the same if they ever returned to that cheerful coffee shop.

"I don't know how to talk to you while you look like this," Hermione muttered, their elbows linked as they strolled the length of the alley. "All of these people are going to think you're my sister or something."

"Better than them thinking you're shagging a Death Eater," he muttered back.

Hermione coloured, for though she had done her damnedest in the past days to forget the notion that having sex would replenish their strength sooner, she'd been having the most explicit dreams of her entire life starring the sour wizard she was currently cohabiting with.

"Right," she muttered, though the intense dreams she'd been having suggested that there might actually be _nothing_ better than shagging this particular Death Eater.

"Hermione!" someone called as they hurried the length of the alley despite the falling snow.

"Oh, no," Hermione muttered.

"Ignore them," Snape commanded from beside her.

"I can't," Hermione shook her head. "They're colleagues."

"So what?" he rolled his eyes. "We don't have a cover story."

"You're my cousin," she said quickly, thinking fast. "From Australia."

"With a scouse accent?" he asked sardonically, raising that damnable eyebrow of his, though the expression on the face of the sweet muggle teenager lost some of its effects. Not all, of course. It seemed no matter what skin he wore, this man could make an art out of looking like the entire world irritated him just by being.

"Plenty of people born to families with accents pick up that accent, rather than that of their regional settlements," Hermione said.

"Hermione!? Is that you?"

Hermione turned with a smile, her eyes tracing over Susan Bones and Abigail Wheatley.

"Susan," Hermione smiled welcomingly. "Abigail. Hi."

"Fancy seeing you here," Abigail smiled shyly.

"And who's this?" Susan asked nodding to Snape.

Hermione glanced at him, noting the haughty expression on his face and wishing she wore a cloak long enough to make stomping on his foot a feasible course of action.

"This is my cousin, Matilda," Hermione introduced. "She's visiting with her parents from Australia. Over for the holidays, you know?"

"Oh, how wonderful," Susan smiled warmly. "I'm Susan."

She offered her hand and Snape eyed it like it was a dead fish before Hermione subtly elbowed him and he took it.

"Pleasure," he offered coolly.

"And I'm Abigail," the other woman introduced herself, shaking hands too and smiling a little more warmly, ever the nervous wallflower.

"What brings you both to the alley?" Susan asked.

"Oh, we're hunting for some festive decorations," Hermione smiled.

"Lovely," Susan nodded.

Right at that moment, an icy wind blew down the alley and Hermione shivered in her cloak. Snape hissed in annoyance when the abundance of the muggle girl's hair he currently wore blew all over his face, the flyaway strands dancing in the wind.

"Merlin, that's nippy," Susan said. "What say we get out of this icy breeze and stop at the Leaky Cauldron for a butterbeer, Hermione? For the holidays?"

Hermione glanced sideways at Snape, biting her lip on the urge to smile, knowing he was likely to lose his temper at any minute.

"That would be lovely," she smiled, nodding happily.

He looked like he thought it was actually a new and unique form of torture.

"Delightful," he drawled sarcastically.

"Ignore her," Hermione sighed when he stomped ahead of them toward the pub, fishing in a pocket for the small flask of Polyjuice he'd brought in the even that they ended up here longer than necessary. "She's out of sorts today. Wanted to stay in Australia and spend the holidays with her boyfriend, you know?"

"Oh, the poor dear," Susan chuckled. "Young love, am I right?"

Hermione laughed too, making no comment given that the state of her own love life was positively atrocious, presently. Indeed, the closest thing she had to one was the morning wood Snape had been sporting when he woke up spooning her every day since she'd started staying with him.

"What brings you two to the alley today, anyway?" Hermione asked, making small talk with the pair of women. She worked with both of them at the Ministry, though in different departments. They often had lunch at the same time and had formed a habit of sharing a lunch table to dine in company.

"Holiday shopping," Susan smiled. "I've left mine to the last minute this year, I'm afraid. I really need to be getting on top of it and Abigail mentioned that she was a little behind as well."

"I'm always the worst for it," Abigail chimed in. "I always tell myself there's still plenty of time and then suddenly it's Christmas Eve and I've got nothing to give anyone and no food in the house."

"I know what you mean," Hermione nodded. "I'm behind on my shopping this year, myself. I've just been feeling so run down, I swear I've spent most of the last week curled under a blanket, alternating between reading and dozing."

"It's been the perfect weather for it," Susan nodded. "Hannah, love, how are you? Four butterbeers, please."

"Ladies," Hannah Abbott grinned at them from behind the bar. "Merlin, you lot are a sight for sore eyes."

Hermione grinned.

"How've you been, Hannah?" she asked the other girl, recalling that her last letter correspondence with Neville suggested he and Hannah were on their way to becoming an item.

"Run clear off my feet, it seems," Hannah laughed, popping the tops off their butterbeers. "Holidays are always busy with staff parties and everyone wants to bring their out-of-town relatives here for lunch or dinner, you know? It's a good problem to have, but my aching feet beg to differ."

Hermione laughed.

"And there we were saying we've all been slack for the holidays," Hermione chuckled, nudging Snape when he took his butterbeer and scowled sourly. "This is Matilda, my cousin."

"Alright, Matilda?" Hannah grinned warmly. "I didn't know you had any family, Hermione."

Hermione chuckled nervously.

"She's over from Australia," Hermione offered.

"We're not that close," Snape offered coolly, and the other ladies all looked slightly uncomfortable while Hermione fought the urge to smile. He really was an ogre.

"But we're working to change that, aren't we?" she teased, slinging her arm around his shoulders and ruffling his hair.

He made a noise of annoyance, trying to duck away from her but Hermione hung onto him.

Susan laughed quietly.

"She's terrorising you then, Matilda?" Susan asked. "It's not like Hermione to badger people into liking her."

Hermione stuck her tongue out at the other girl who she had, indeed, badgered into befriending her by sitting with her every day in the cafeteria at work after she and Ron had broken things off and she hadn't wanted to sit with Harry and Ron while she got over it.

"Hermione would never badger anyone into loving her," Abigail grinned, the younger woman having attended Beauxbatons for school despite being English-born, but who would have undoubtedly been a Hufflepuff like Susan, had she attended Hogwarts instead.

"Hermione makes an art of pestering people into defying their baser nature," Snape replied evenly, allowing Hermione to lead him over to a booth and sitting along with the other women.

She stomped on his foot under the table when he looked like he wanted to be anywhere else.

"That's actually expertly put," Susan laughed.

Hermione grinned, twining her ankle around Snape's under the table and finding that even in a different skin, the touch of their skin helped boost her flagging energy. They spent almost an hour sitting and chatting with the other women despite Snape's obvious wish to be literally anywhere else and Hermione wondered how much of an earful she'd cop later when they returned to his cottage and he could unleash his fearsome temper.

When finally, they bid the other women goodbye and waved to Hannah before spilling back out into the snow, he shot her a dirty look and guzzled more of the Polyjuice he'd brought along, looking none too happy with her.

"Sorry," she offered. "Some of us haven't been living in complete solitude following a faked death. It's only polite to catch up with friends at the holidays."

"It was a waste of time and energy."

"For you, maybe," she shrugged. "Come on, let's get on with the shopping, shall we?"

"Not going to drag me to any more of your girly chit-chats about boys and bras?" he sneered.

"Bras are an important topic of discussion because they are uncomfortable, expensive, and yet necessary if one wishes to portray an air of professionalism and put-togetherness," Hermione said. "We ladies have to endure their horror daily. And as you are currently aware, they're awful. If one happens to find a decent brand, it is a woman's duty to share her finding with her fellow warrior-women."

He scowled recalling that he currently wore one of her bras because the skin he wore came with an impressive pair of knockers.

"Ridiculous," he muttered, storming off in search of their intended purchases, heading for a small and dingy shop on the edge of Knockturn Alley.

Hermione shook her head and followed him, not noticing the gleaming yellow eyes watching her from the shadows.

**~O~**

"Are you going to keep huffing like that?" Hermione asked two hours later after he'd dragged her all over the Alley looking for different things, evidently more intent on the holiday trimmings than she'd imagined.

She'd lured him into the book store with the intention of finding some last-minute gifts for the friends and colleagues she had yet to purchase for and he was cranky.

"We need to go," he said tightly.

"Why?" she frowned at him, looking up from the book she'd been perusing that she was thinking of giving Molly Weasley. "You should still have plenty of potion left."

He shot her a dirty look.

"We're… not alone," he murmured quietly, moving closer to her and putting a hand on her shoulder under the pretence of balancing to reach for a book on a high shelf.

"What do you mean?" Hermione asked, looking around and seeing no one they knew.

"Across the street," he murmured so softly that she almost missed it.

Hermione frowned, tossing her hair over her shoulder and searching the street outside the window.

"I don't see anyone?" she muttered.

"Under the overhang," he whispered. "Disillusioned. You can only see when he moves."

"He?" she asked, her stomach twisting.

"Greyback," Snape murmured.

"Oh, shit," she whispered.

"As I said," he inclined his head. "He's been following us for a while now."

"And you're only just mentioning it?"

"I thought we'd be on our way before now," he scowled. "He was loitering further back before, but he's growing bolder."

"He can't show his face here and get away with it," Hermione said. "He's still all over all the wanted posters."

"Like that will stop him?" Snape rolled his eyes. "He can move faster than most people can see. He could burst in here and rip out everyone's throats before they even knew he was here. Greyback is much older and much more powerful than you imagine, Miss Granger. He could not have survived having me cut out his human heart and yet lived to tell the tale if he wasn't much older, stronger, and more magically gifted that he has previously ever let on. Believe, he means us harm and is more than capable of causing it."

"So we should leave?" she asked.

"Yes," he nodded. "And we should do so by a means he won't be able to follow. The last thing we need is him finding out where we live."

Hermione caught the way he said 'we live', though he didn't seem to notice it himself as he strode over to the counter to pay for the basketful of books he'd collected for purchase. She hid her smile, glancing over her shoulder and catching the glimmer of magic against the wall where Greyback moved. She narrowed her eyes on him hatefully though she couldn't see his face before she followed Snape to the counter and paid for her purchases.

"Don't move," Snape muttered when the bell rang a few moments later, the door opening seemingly of its own accord.

"Shit," Hermione whispered.

The bookshop clerk was too busy searching the supposedly empty doorway to continue scanning her purchases and Hermione snapped her fingers impatiently. Snape's hand slid to the small of her back and he pressed closer to her, his own purchases already bagged.

"Seventeen galleons, ma'am," the clerk cleared his throat when he realised he'd been distracted.

Hermione handed over the money quickly, aware of Snape's wand gripped in his hand while he looked over her shoulder.

"One," Snape breathed to her, his eyes fixed on something she couldn't see.

Hermione closed her eyes briefly, unsure she could face apparating when she was exhausted after spending so long shopping.

"Two," he whispered.

"Three!" a low voice growled from right next to her on the other side. "Hello, girly."

"Fuck," Snape swore, yanking Hermione sideways as soon as she snatched up her bag of books.

The bombarda curse left his wand silently and the bookstore clerk gave a shout of surprise when the disillusionment charm on the werewolf failed as he was blasted across the shop. Snape grasped Hermione tightly and twisted, disapparating quickly, prioritising their escape over helping the other shoppers deal with the irate werewolf in their midst.

Her stomach was twisting hideously when they landed somewhere, though she hadn't the foggiest of where that might be.

"Where?" she tried to ask.

"Again," Snape barked, twisting again and Hermione closed her eyes, turning into him and simply letting him lead her, the risk of splinching given their combined magical depletion high and her nausea growing by the minute.

"Again," he said into her ear when they slammed into solid ground again.

Hermione wrapped her arms around his mid-section and simply hung on, letting him jump again and again and again, leading a merry dance to Merlin only knew where. She didn't protest. She knew why it was necessary. Her friendship with Remus and her study of werewolves had taught her that those who embraced their baser nature were more in touch with the elements and the world around them. Greyback could feasibly follow them wherever they went because of disturbances in the magical seams of the universe's fabric thanks to their apparations.

"Run!" Snape said, dropping her.

"Where?" she gasped, her head spinning dizzily.

He simply took her head, towing her along down a country lane and around a corner.

"Again!" he barked when they rounded a tree into a field full of sheep.

Hermione groaned, letting him lead her, feeling queasy now.

"I'm going to be sick," she warned when they next landed.

"Don't," he growled like his command alone would be enough to settle her errant stomach.

Hermione scoffed and nearly threw up when he twisted again, bouncing four more times and towing her through a section of some forest she didn't recognise.

"Almost there," he muttered when she covered her mouth with her hand, looking up at him worriedly and trying to swallow back the urge to mess his shoes.

"I'm gonna…" she muttered.

"No," he growled, his eyes darting down to meet hers. "Not yet."

Hermione gulped, squeezing her eyes closed and letting him put his arms around her, tugging her into his chest before he twisted again, dragging her with him. It occurred to her only when they finally stopped spinning and she pulled back slowly to see they reached his back garden that some time while they'd fled, the Polyjuice had worn off.

Hermione traced her eyes over him.

"Oh, Merlin," she giggled at the sight of him still in her clothes which now fit extremely ill.

"Not a word, Miss Granger," he growled, turning and storming into the house.

Hermione bit her lip, trying desperately to keep from laughing but he looked hilarious in her jeans and sweater. The back door to his cottage slammed on the sound of her laughter ringing over the snow-covered garden.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: *scuttles in, grinning*
> 
> *does a happy jig to see you all*
> 
> *waves the chapter about in the air excitedly*
> 
> *wiggles eyebrows*
> 
> *flings it down on top of your breakfast*
> 
> *dives behind the couch*
> 
> xx-Kitten.

When she managed to control herself, Hermione hurried into the house behind him, the laughter having managed to cure her churning stomach of its vile rolling after so many apparations. She found Snape in the bedroom at the top of the stairs, struggling and cursing loudly, twisting his arms into pretzels and trying to get the bra she'd made him wear while Polyjuiced, off his body.

"Told you they were horrible," she smirked as she entered the room. "Hold still before you hurt yourself or wreck one of my favourite bras, would you?"

He hissed like an angry feline but presented her his back so that she might undo the clasp. She spotted the reason for his struggles immediately. The girl he'd transformed into had been young and rather petite, even smaller than Hermione, and as such, when they'd done the bra up, they'd been forced to use the tightest level of hooks they could. As Severus Snape, a grown man in his forties, however, his chest was much broader, his back much wider, and his body simply much larger. The bra was pulled so tight it was a wonder the hooks or the seams hadn't given way under the strain.

"Crap," Hermione muttered, seeing the angry red welts the fabric was cutting into him. "Sorry. This might pinch."

Heaving on both ends, she managed to wrench it even tighter, relieving the strain on the hooks and quickly unclasping them. Snape sighed audibly as the pressure released and the fabric slid down his arms and off him, leaving him bare chest.

"You've got welts," she said. "I'm sorry. I have a salve for this, actually. Let me get it."

"Miss Granger," he tried to stop her, but Hermione was already digging into her trunk in search of it.

"Here it is!" she announced. "If you could just turn back around…. What are you doing?"

Snape stood there in the middle of the room, his cheeks bright pink, his eyes fixed upon her.

"Snape?" she asked when he didn't say anything.

"I… I can't get the jeans off either," he admitted uncomfortably, and Hermione looked down to see that while his narrow hips left room at the waistband, the fabric was pulled taut across his groin and over his thighs. After all, he was a grown man and his legs were not the same shape as those of a skinny teenage girl.

"Oh, dear," Hermione said, eyeing him.

"They're going to…. The underwear is caught…" he managed lamely, looking like he wanted to be literally anywhere else.

Hermione pressed her lips together when the urge to giggle overcame her once again.

"Um…" she managed. "Why don't I just…?"

She moved over to him, tossing the salve on the bed and reaching for the jeans. They were already open where he'd tried to wrench them off himself, so Hermione gave them an experimental tug. They didn't budge.

"Maybe if I…"

She crouched, pulling at the side seams in line with his knees instead. They shift a centimetre.

You're making them tighter," he muttered, and Hermione rolled her eyes.

"I don't see how," she frowned up at him only to realise as she moved onto her knees and tugged them again that his cheeks had darkened to crimson.

He glared down at her hatefully and Hermione frowned back up at him. When he raised a sole eyebrow and nodded toward his pants, she followed his gaze and gasped.

"Well," she managed. "I would argue that _you're_ the one making them tighter with that."

His growing erection twitched in disagreement.

"Is it just because I'm on my knees?" she smirked up at him, taking perverse pleasure in teasing him.

"Miss Granger," he growled.

"You can call me Hermione, you know," she reminded him. "It would seem, based on whatever you must be thinking about me at the moment, that we're a bit beyond the formality of titles, don't you think?"

"I'm going to obliviate you," he warned her. "Wipe your memory of this entire soul-bond and dump you somewhere to figure your life out without memory of me in it."

Hermione snorted.

"And doom yourself in the process?" she challenged. "After that merry dance you just led, apparating so many times, you'll be lucky if either of us can get out of bed before the end of January."

"If you hadn't loitered about drinking with friends and looking in every shop window, we might not have been pursued by Greyback," he argued.

"You were the one who said he'd been shadowing us for some time. Why didn't you tell me as soon as you noticed him? We could've run then instead of letting him close enough that he might've latched on when we tried to flee."

"I didn't imagine you'd peruse the shops for hours, allowing him to grow bold enough to approach."

"You still should've said something," Hermione argued.

"And what might I have said? I was trying to keep from blowing our cover. The last thing we need is him sniffing around trying to find the muggle girl I was Polyjuiced as."

"Oh, Merlin… do you think she'll be in danger?" Hermione asked, her eyes widening with worry.

"She's young, pretty and female, and was supposedly last seen in your presence," Snape sneered. "If he ever finds her, he'll kill her. Or worse."

"We have to protect her," Hermione said.

"We have to stay away from her, lest he is led to her all the sooner," Snape argued.

"We can't just leave her, unsuspecting and vulnerable," Hermione said.

"If he manages to make sense of that apparation knot I created and finds his way to this particular village, we'll have bigger things to worry about than the safety of some muggle girl, Miss Granger," he growled. "He means to murder you. Probably both of us."

"Or worse," Hermione shuddered.

"Precisely," he muttered. "How attached are you to these jeans? A severing charm would solve this problem."

"They're my second favourite," Hermione stopped him, shaking her head and pulling at the legs of them again, trying to remove them from his person.

"They're too tight," he huffed.

"You're making them tighter," she muttered, noting that his erection was still growing.

"I'm going to hex them off myself," he said.

"Or you could take a small sip of the potion and transform for a few minutes, long enough to remove them without further drama," Hermione suggested.

Snape huffed at her, but he seemed to see the logic in her words. Hermione rose back to her feet as he found the flask with the remaining potion inside and took a very small sip. Before her eyes, his skin bubbled and he took the shape of the muggle girl all over again.

"Close your eyes," she said quickly when the body sprouted tits again, bare given his shirtlessness.

Snape did as he was told, holding his hands out to the sides, and Hermione took pity on him, helping him out of the jeans as fast as she could. Just in time too. Before she could quite finish getting them off his ankles, the tiny sip of potion wore off and he was back to being male and glaring down at her from the end of the bed where she'd had him sit.

"Maybe a shower?" she suggested, glancing up at him. "The effects of those apparations are beginning to kick in already, I can feel it."

"Miss Granger, given the state of things, the last thing we need to discuss is showering," he growled, and Hermione noted that he'd put his hands in his lap over the boxers he'd insisted on still wearing instead of any of her knickers for the sake of their charade, trying desperately to hide that he was still aroused.

"You'd rather go straight to bed?" she smirked, her eyes glittering with mischief.

He looked up at her sharply and Hermione could tell he wanted to maim her.

"I know," she chuckled. "You hate me and wish you could obliviate me and go back to your life of solitude. You'll get over it, sir. If you're not showering, at least hold still and I'll put some of this on your back. You've got terrible welts."

She reached for the salve she'd dug out of her trunk, unscrewing the top quickly.

"That might not be the best… idea," he trailed off when Hermione dipped her fingers in the cool liquid and smeared some across his skin where the fabric had chaffed him.

He shivered under the cold of the cream and her cool fingers, but he didn't pull away.

"You realise after the amount of magic we just expended things are going to get worse, don't you?" he said eventually when she'd rubbed cream into every mark, her fingers idly tracing the scarred skin of his back, wondering what all he had endured that he bore so many.

"Yes," Hermione murmured.

"It will likely make having purchased all those things to decorate for the holidays a waste of time… neither of us will have the energy to unpack them, let alone display them and enjoy them."

"Probably," Hermione sighed.

"It might be wise to send an owl to whomever you intended to spend Christmas with and tell them you can't make it," he suggested. "I don't imagine you'll be in any condition."

"They'll worry and want answers if I just cancel on them," Hermione argued. "And probably come looking for me if I ignore their demands for an explanation."

Snape gave a long-suffering sigh.

"The alternative is to attend and attempt to explain why you're dead on your feet," he argued.

Hermione sighed too, just imagining the amounts of questions she'd be forced to field if she faced her friends like a zombie, exhausted and utterly depleted.

"Perhaps… that other means of recuperating faster _is_ worth considering after all," Hermione murmured, feeling him tense where he sat beside her.

He looked over his shoulder at her sharply.

"Do you know what you're saying?" he demanded, and Merlin help her, he looked exhausted and angry and guarded and curious all at once.

Hermione bit her bottom lip, her eyes tracing over his face slowly, trying to gauge whether he was angry and disgusted at the suggestion, or intrigued, maybe even eager. His hands were still in his lap, trying to hide the evidence that as a human male, he occasionally experienced arousal.

"I'm saying that spooning in bed together won't be enough to keep us both from death's door and that there's another alternative we've been dismissing that _could_ be employed to recuperate more swiftly," Hermione said diplomatically.

Snape eyed her guardedly, and Hermione wished she knew him well enough to get some kind of read on what he was thinking and whether she'd offended him, disgusted him, or intrigued him.

"You understand that the alternative in question involves you and I practising sexual intercourse, don't you?" he clarified explicitly, though she knew that he knew she was fully aware of the idea given than he'd learned of it from her in the first place.

"I understand," she nodded.

"You understand there would be no taking that back, don't you?" he said, lowering his voice as though someone might overhear them even though they were alone in his house.

Hermione nodded.

Snape eyed her some more when she bit her lip again. She was nervous. She didn't like not knowing if he was interested or horrified by her suggestion.

"Miss Granger, you're suggesting that you and I shag just so you can spend Christmas with the Weasleys," he stated bluntly, and Hermione's stomach flipped.

He sounded angry.

He probably was angry.

When he put it like that, it sounded terrible. Like she would just be using him for sex so she could get on with better things. Merlin, was she? She'd never have considered herself attracted enough to him to have sex with him before all this mess, would she? Just because she'd somehow tethered their souls didn't mean they had to like each other, let alone fancy each other enough for sex. She gulped, sensing his mounting fury while he glared at her.

"Are you so afraid of being alone with me for the holidays that you would lower yourself to that?" he spat before he rose to his feet in only his boxers and stalked out of the room.

Hermione flinched when first the bedroom and then the bathroom doors both slammed in his wake.


End file.
